


path of cinders

by cosmya



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (sort of), Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, POV Missy (Doctor Who), Post-Episode: s10e10 The Eaters of Light, Redemption, Self-Reflection, Slow Burn, Therapy, simulations, supervillain rehabilitation boot camp
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:01:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 42,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27702467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmya/pseuds/cosmya
Summary: The Monks used a simulation device to practice conquering the world. With the same technology, Missy is given the chance to use it to practice saving them. Under the Doctor’s watchful eye, of course, and he has the perfect place to start - his own experiences.Or, rather, a crash course in how to stop being evil told through Missy’s journey through the Doctor’s memories.
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor & Missy, Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> for a fleeting moment the first time I saw World Enough and Time, I thought the premise of this work was actually what the episode was going to be. and when it wasn’t, I was ecstatic, because it meant that not only did I get a season finale that I loved beyond my wildest dreams, I could write it myself. so here it is, my first work for this fandom, borne of a silly and incorrect prediction.
> 
> title from bachelorette by björk

When he’s not here, I like to imagine that this is my Tardis.

It’s a good thing I have above-average imagination skills, because it’s not that easy. The decor isn’t to my taste, for one. And the controls are locked out to me again, as the Doctor’s way of saying hey, thanks Missy for all you’ve done to save my life! I can’t even leave unless he lets me, which he doesn’t, so instead I get to wait and mope and snoop around until him and Bill return from whatever idiocy they’ve gotten into this time.

Strictly speaking, it’s like my vault, my prison cell, has up and grown legs. And been curated more to torment me than keep me busy. It should probably feel like a worse punishment than the vault. But I can still feel the movement outside and hear the sound generating that loathsome sense in me when we’re traveling through time. I can still feel the warmth of the levers and buttons on the control panel, like the Tardis herself wants me as much as I want her. I can think about where I would take her and the Doctor and I, were I at the helm. What mischief we’d get up to.

All of this useless pretending, in the face of constant reminders that this ship isn’t mine, should hurt. And it does hurt. But I do it again and again.

I’m reading one of the dull books he keeps out for show when they come back this time. The thunder of my hearts grows more urgent, and I hope he doesn’t hear it. 

Perhaps this will be the time.

“Missy?”

“Yes…?” I answer, playing it cool.

He sucks in his cheeks and looks up at me. He looks triumphant over something. Bill enters the Tardis behind him, mouth shut. “What would you say if I offered you a deal? An… adventure? A way out of here, a way to see the universe… freshly?”

I know my heartbeats are loud enough for him to hear now. “Something like that wouldn’t come without a price.”

He smiles; it’s such a prickly thing and I wonder if he knows what he looks like when he does it. “This is the price.”

“Oh, great. A riddle. You know how I love that.” (In this case, I’m not actually lying, though.)

“It’ll be fun,” he urges. “This is what you’ve wanted, right?”

“Are you offering me to come with you?” I posit. “Out there? Doing things? Saving worlds? Do you have a leash for me?”

His smile grows wider. “Not a leash, no.”

Strange, how picturing something, even something as abstract as freedom, a thousand times still doesn’t get you any closer to knowing the real thing. “So you’re expecting me to just… follow your orders,” I say with exaggerated incredulity.

He doesn’t answer; his face is trying to contort itself into something that resembles enigmatic, but it just looks smug.

“Well, you’re not letting me go alone.”

“No,” he answers.

I glance over to Bill, who looks like she’s trying to stay out of it, but knows that deep down, she failed at ‘staying out of it’ a long time ago. “He talked me into it.”

“You’ll both be fine,” the Doctor answers cryptically. There’s a secret in his voice. “Consider, Missy, that you’ve earned a portion of my trust. It’s about time you got the chance to earn more. Go out and prove to me that you’re not all vaporizing people and starting wars.”

Everything I’ve imagined since the vault flashes before my eyes once more. It’s a little different, without him there, but maybe the real future - the places and times and experiences I haven’t thought of yet, as shadowy as they are - may come true as a result of this dire sacrifice. Sure, I could run. But the Doctor has thought of this. Bill is his insurance policy. If she’s with me, he’ll hunt me down to save her. If I kill her, he’ll hunt me down anyway. Maybe I’d like what happens next, maybe I wouldn’t. But this future is easier to foresee than what mystery might occur as a result of me playing along. Confinement has given me an ache for chaos.

A smile even bigger than the Doctor’s spreads across my face. I look to Bill and I might as well be a man-eating shark grinning at her. “I accept. Oh, don’t worry Bill. It’ll be fun! Just us girls. No pesky Doctor around for once.”

“Pretty sure anything you consider ‘fun’, I will consider ‘extremely painful’.”

I make a high, noncommittal noise. No use in lying.

“I’ll be waiting to intervene if she puts you, or anyone else, in immediate danger,” the Doctor assures us.

“Ooh, training wheels!” I exclaim. “Even more fun.”

Despite my sarcasm, Bill seems to believe him. The little I see of her is a paradox. One that tells me she is either a fool or is content with lying to herself. She trusts the Doctor, feels safe with him, believes him when he says everything will be alright. At this point, it’s nigh unthinkable that she doesn’t love him. But considering what she clearly thinks of me… she can’t understand him. There is one critical part of him that she cannot believe.

This is fine, of course. It’s not like the Doctor ever wanted anybody’s approval before. And, as humans don’t last that long, it won’t really matter in the end anyway.

“So, where are we going, Doctor?” I ask. “Skaro? Gallifrey? Earth?”

“No, no, and no.”

“Oh, so you’re getting creative on me,” I say, raising an eyebrow.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t think you want to go back to any of those any more than I want to see you there.”

My other eyebrow follows suit. “Okay,” I drawl. “Somewhere else, then. Somewhere I haven’t been, I assume. But something familiar, or else how are you supposed to judge my actions?” I look at his mouth, and the way he tries to keep it a straight line when all he wants to do is smirk at me, and it clicks. “Oh! I know. I’m going to relive your adventures, aren’t I? Only without you?” I wave my hands demonstrably. “You deposit me wherever I’m going well before you save the day, presumably. And then come collect me before you - the earlier you, the one who doesn’t know I’ve been there - shows up. To avoid any nasty little paradoxes with the assurance that you’ll fix it anyway. Maybe…” and this part is exciting, “I’m the one who messes things up in the first place. Rather confusing, but I see how you could convince yourself it’s clever. It’s tidy, I’ll give you that. You’ll be watching from the sidelines, I take it?”

He’s not amused anymore; he folds his arms across his artfully tattered sweater. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t be there.”

“Well obviously that’s what you meant. It wouldn’t be the same with you along, now would it? I’d be glancing back at you every time I did anything. Watching for your approval. Performing.” Or at least you’d think I was. “I know what you want, silly. You want me to forget you’re watching, safe in your Tardis. You want me to be,” I do a little twirl, “myself.”

“I don’t think anybody wants that,” says Bill.

“I have it on good authority that you’re wrong,” I retort, waving a finger at her. “And if you’re going to be like that to me this whole time, it’s going to be very difficult for us to develop a close friendship.”

She decides to ignore this remark and sighs instead. “Let’s get this over with, Doctor.”

He nods and fiddles with the Tardis controls. “Close your eyes and count to ten,” he instructs me.

I happily comply, and I don’t even peek. That wouldn’t be a very nice way to start this game. The Tardis begins to whoosh and I count aloud in time with its familiar rhythm. 

“Ten,” I finish dramatically.

He’s still smiling at me, and it’s beginning to get annoying. Now I’m glad he isn’t coming. “Good luck.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Let’s go, Bill.” 

She waves her hand. “After you.”

The door opens, and my cage widens. 

The Tardis is an island in a sea of gold. I shade my eyes from the sunshine and squint. Ahead of us, there’s a narrow path through the wheat, and in the middle distance is an elegant metal structure that reminds me of a hive. Bill looks more impressed than me; you’d think she’d be over it by now.

“Couldn’t have landed any closer,” I mutter under my breath. “Well. Might as well get it over with.”

“Get what over with?” Bill asks. “What are we here for, anyway? Where are we?”

“You tell me.” Apparently the Doctor doesn’t trust her with his exact plans any more than he does me.

“I’d rather just go and find out, if that’s all the information you’re gonna give me.” She sounds unexpectedly excited and as such, makes for the structure with a bounciness I decide to mock, my petticoat picking up fallen grains of wheat. I’ll make Bill do the dry-cleaning. 

As I follow, I disallow myself from looking back. As if the Doctor needs to stand in the doorway or peer through a window to see us.

Bill looks back at me. “Have you ever been here?”

“Do you actually think I’d tell you if I had?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Her trust in people is truly remarkable. It is odd, though, for her to think the Doctor would put me somewhere I’ve been before. If the whole point is to annoy me, I can’t let it get to me after two minutes. It’s fine. I can play along. “Well, I haven’t. I can make some inferences, however. Wheat is a uniquely human crop, for one.”

She brushes her hands over the tops of the dry stalks. “So this isn’t, like, alien wheat?”

“Alien wheat is blue.”

She laughs like I’m joking. Maybe she’s just acting too, or trying to lure me into a sense of security, or maybe she’s actually coming around. 

“Soooooo….” I begin. “Where do we start? Been a while since I traveled with-” I snap my jaw shut suddenly before I can finish the sentence with ‘the Doctor’. Why am I still talking about him? Especially when I know he can hear every word? The last thing I need is for him to know how much I’m thinking of him.

“Since you what?”

“Since I saw a planet this deserted,” I lie.

“Is that a bad thing?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m on a deserted alien planet, which you don’t seem to recognize, and I want to know whether something’s up. I think that’s pretty reasonable,” Bill argues, but it’s with the placid intonation of someone who thinks she’s in a dream.

“Hm. Yeah. Probably, there’s something up. Use your brain, Bill. All this bread-to-be and nobody to eat it.”

She still doesn’t look perturbed. Unflappable, this one. So different from Clara. “Are there not, like, farming planets?” she suggests.

“Very good, dearie. You’ll make a good all-of-time-and-space traveler yet.”

“Dearie?” she repeats indignantly.

“What? You don’t like it? I’ve got more. How about ‘pumpkin’? ‘Pudding’? ‘Sexy’?”

“Erm. Bill’s good.” 

“Fiiiine. Bill it is. You can use any of those on me, though, if you like.”

“Uh.” She’s decidedly looking nowhere near me. “I know sometimes it seems we’ve got that, like, kind of secretive, shady, student-teacher thing going on, but that’s a bit too far for me. You’re gonna have to settle for ‘Doctor’.”

I almost stop in my tracks as comprehension dawns on me. That stupid, genius little stick insect. That’s why Bill was suddenly so comfortable when we left the Tardis. She thinks I’m the Doctor. What is it, perception filter? Memory alteration? Doesn’t matter, for I’m certainly not about to spoil the surprise, and if it wears off… oh, the look on her face! 

I laugh; she’ll think I’ve been joking the whole time. “‘Doctor’ is perfect.”

* * *

The hem of my skirt is dusty by the time we reach our destination. It’s a foyer of sorts, with a sleek metal staircase leaping up to our right and a long hallway to our left. Ahead is a lovely courtyard with a pristine aquamarine pool and little else. Bill runs up the stairs, presumably to get a bird’s-eye view of the emptied planet. It’s warm and dry in here, and finally I have space to figure out why the Doctor sent us here.

And yet, before I come up with anything beyond “there aren’t any lethal weapons in immediate sight”, I hear a muted mechanical whirring off to my left.

It’s a plasticky white robot, cheap and mass-produced looking, with a cartoon smiley face on a screen where a face should go. It doesn’t do anything beyond sitting there and giving me the image of a smile.

“Hello,” I say sweetly, squatting down to its level like it's a child I’m about to give poisoned candy to. “I’m the Doctor. And you are…?” I ask, facilitating introductions.

It doesn’t respond. The silence is as blank as the robot’s toothless grin.

“Okay. I guess I’ll talk for the both of us. ‘Hi, The Doctor. I’m…’” I give the robot a good up-and-down before settling on a name. “‘Frowny.’”

Still nothing. It must like the name.

“Nice to meet you, Frowny. Have you met my best friend Bill?” I sweep my hand towards the stairs; she’s still leaning over a balcony staring into the distance.

“Bill!” I call up to her. “Come over here. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Oh, yeah?” She quickly descends the stairs. “This, uh… guy?”

“Yes. His name’s Frowny. Frowny, say hello.”

Nothin’.

“Sorry, Bill. He’s a little shy.”

“Looks friendly, though. Is that a touch screen?” She reaches out and presses Frowny’s face. The smile remains, but Bill jumps a little when its jointed, humanish arms raise slowly toward her. In its palms are two yellow, blank circles. She looks at me, shifty-eyed. “What d’you reckon these are?”

I shrug and take one, lifting it up to the sunlight filtering in through the frosty glass, and place it into my eye socket like a monocle.

Bill bursts out laughing. “It’s an emoji!”

“Emoji? So I’ve got two hearts and two faces?”

“Two hearts?” Bill asks, puzzled.

Did he not already tell her that? What a strange secret to keep. “I’d be delighted to go over Time Lord anatomy later, but right now-” I take the emoji badge out and flip it around, but suddenly, there’s nothing there. 

“Oh, that’s weird,” says Bill. “It’s on the other side, now. Here,” she takes the other one, “is mine doing it too?”

“Yes,” I answer, smirking. “Yours looks a bit… puzzled.”

The moment I say it, Frowny’s face switches to the same puzzled expression. Bill shrugs. “Got a lot to be puzzled about. Guess this is old hat to you, though, because yours just looks… happy.”

Out of all the emotional states for a basic robot to boil me down to, ‘happy’ is not what I would have guessed. Meaning it can’t be terribly good at what it does. “I am happy! Made a new friend, began prying open a mystery…”

“Right…” she pontificates. “Well, I like the emojis. I’m keeping it.” She moves to put the badge on her shirt, but as soon as it touches the fabric, it moves of its own accord around to her back. She reaches around for it, but it’s found that one place you can never reach yourself. 

I make a face of fake alarm, not knowing whether it’ll be enough to fool the emoji. “Mm. They don’t want you to see your own mood. Smart. Elseway, wouldn’t that taint the result?”

“How so?” 

She eyes mine, still in my hand, and I affix it to myself, feeling it crawl over to my back like a hungry caterpillar. For now, it’s better that Bill can’t see my impressive mood stability. More convincing. “It wouldn’t be genuine if you knew you were being observed.”

“I s’pose.”

“No, you don’t s’pose, I’m right. So, Bill, that’s two clues now, in addition to the whole, ‘where in tarnation is everyone’ thing. Vast fields of human grain and robots designed to sense emotion.”

“Three, actually. There’s these weird black clouds buzzing around outside, like locusts. Or bees, more likely. You think they pollinate the crops?” Bill is back to smiling now. She sure does a lot of that.

I make a show of Sherlock-ing the facts all together. “‘Crops’, you say, but all I saw is wheat. Can’t live on bread alone. Believe me, I’ve tried. All in all, I’d say this is getting pretty fishy…” I say with a wink. “I think you’re onto something. We should look around. Lead the way?” I suggest. I want to see her emoji when she finds what I think we’ll find. For now, it has settled on happy, and Frowny’s has too, though the robot doesn’t follow us.

We traipse down the corridors, but they are totally devoid of humans. In the distance, I see a few more robots like Frowny, but I don’t say a word to Bill. There’s something wrong; I can smell death. But I don’t want to poison Bill’s curious exploratory nature that’s clearly being practiced right now, and moreover, death is always more entertaining when it’s a surprise. 

“Quite a maze, huh, Bill? Where do you think it might be leading us?”

“What?”

“Frowny told me to keep taking left turns. Maybe we should try that.”

“He did not.”

“Don’t you want to try, though? What if he did?”

If Bill knew she was talking to Missy, she would probably make a point to take every right turn she could, or simply run in whatever direction was away from me. To the Doctor, though, she just smiles and says yes, wondering aloud about her feeble theories for where the people all are. These humans are all so dreadfully optimistic.

I feel like I have to pretend to give her ideas some affirmation to keep up the show of being the Doctor. It’s exhausting; I don’t know how, or better question, why, he does it . Saving me from death-by-boredom, the spindly hallways finally spit us out at something that is interesting to look at. We are in a conservatory-slash-greenhouse-slash-sunroom with full-grown trees arranged carefully around paths and benches that look to be made of the same material as everything else, which is to say, matte-white and plain-Jane. There’s a door open at the end of it, and Bill strides toward it like it holds the very secrets of eternal happiness.

Which means she misses something. I normally find the poor observational and analytical skills of humans insufferable, but now I’m experiencing firsthand why the Doctor finds them so amusing. There’s a necklace on the ground; Bill nearly steps on it. I pick it up, put it on, and follow her inside the door.

The room is a sort of agricultural nursery, or rudimentary laboratory, with newborn phenotypes clinging to wooden stakes and steel piping hung from the ceiling dispensing white powder onto the plant beds. Bill seems taken with the green infants, because they are familiar to her. “Look at that! Tomatoes, strawberries, and I think this one is,” she trots to a small, spiky bush, “rosemary. We have it outside the Union, and sometimes I sneak some home to add to dinner.”

“Lovely. What d’you think that is, though?” I ask, pointing ahead to a blocky silver contraption opposite the door and past all the flowerbeds which is generating the only noise in this place. 

“Composter?”

I give her my best ‘really, Bill?’ look. “Do you smell compost?”

“Well, no.”

Trying to look puzzled, rather than condescending, Istick my hand into the falling white powder. “Hm. How odd. I think that’s… calcium?”

“Like... fertilizer? So maybe that thing’s making it.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Bill opens the hatch on its front and peers inside. “Oh, it’s like some sort of… grinder? Like for coffee, but a massive one. I guess that explains the noise.”

“What’s it grinding, Bill?”

“Well, there’s nothing in here right now… hold on, there’s another hatch here at the bottom…” She crouches down and fiddles with the handle, but it seems to be stuck. “Can’t get it…” She stands back up and shrugs. “Guess we’ll never know.”

I openly laugh at her, because honestly, I don’t think she’s going to make it much longer anyway at this point. I have half a mind to chuck her into the grinder. “Good attitude, Bill! Never give up. I like that. There’s only one way to handle these things.” 

I kick the hatch as hard as I can. “I don’t wear these boots for nothin’, you know.” Oops, that was out of character. Whatever. The hatch opens and bleached bones spill out like candy from a dispenser.

“Oh my god. Oh my god.” Bill backs up like the bones are going to arrange themselves into a dancing skeleton before bludgeoning her with a femur, and looks at me like I knew this was going to happen. (Again, if she knew who I was, this would have been a perfectly valid prediction.) I peek around her back. Her emoji is horrified, which is not actually that easy to convey with an emoji, but somehow, it matches her actual facial expression so well that I can’t help but laugh.

I look back down to the bones, then to Bill, then to the verdant, fruit-bearing plants. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

“What? Are you joking? Right now, seriously? Do you not- Doctor, these are human!” There’s a part of her that wants to run. But she isn’t a complete idiot. She knows how powerless she is. That doesn’t mean I won’t drill that fact in deeper.

I pick an apple from the nearest baby tree. The fruit is far too big and ripe, and the whole branch is being weighed down by it. Don’t bother looking for a metaphor in there. Bill’s expression morphs from horrified to terrified to disturbed to disgusted as I take a bite. “Mm. One of the best I’ve ever had. Want some?” I offer it to her. 

“What the hell is wrong with you? Doctor, do you not see? The fertilizer, it’s… that’s made from people!”

“They’re pretty good at it too,” I quip. “Oh, look! Frowny’s back. Hey, Frowny.”

The robot wheels into the laboratory. His emoji is now matching Bill’s. “Doctor, what- why is it like that now?”

“I don’t think it likes your attitude.” I squat down to Frowny’s level and pretend to pinch its cheek. “Is the girl upsetting you, sweetie? She’s not with me. Promise. I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

In an instant, the screen flicks back to the blank smile we saw when we first arrived. I turn back to Bill and put my hands on my hips. “See, Bill? It’s happy when I’m happy. It must want you to be, too.”

She’s clearly cowering away from me now and not taking my advice. She should know by now that not taking the Doctor’s advice is the first step toward getting yourself killed. As for my advice? I like to think that it would kill you either way. “Happy? Doctor, how am I supposed to be happy right now? What if- what if that thing killed all the people? And then stashed their bodies here?”

Now, my hand drifts up to finger at the necklace I stole. “Why would it need to do that? Do you think it eats apples?”  
  


“Well, no-”

I clear my throat as if preparing to give a lecture, but ‘persuasive speech’ might be a more accurate term for the Doctor, regardless of what he does at the university. “There were humans here once. Obviously. And all that’s left is bones and robots and cute little buzzy clouds outside. That tells me that the humans did something wrong. I think these little guys-” I pet Frowny’s head affectionately- “were designed to make you happy at all costs. Perhaps something came up to make someone unhappy, and the robots had to... eliminate it.” I shrug apologetically. “Whoopsie.”

Frowny spins to face Bill again. The screen doesn’t change to match hers, but flickers to a sort of generic rage, the image of something that these robots aren’t sophisticated enough to really contain. 

“Doctor, what- is it going to do to me? Is it going to-”

“Use you for plant food? If you keep violating its protocols, then what choice does it have? Have you tried being happy? Have you tried smiling?”

The rage I feel coming off of her is the genuine sort. She looks me in the eyes and waves her hands and shrieks about “how could she be happy right now”, “you’re scaring me so much, Doctor”, “what the hell is wrong with you”, “aren’t you afraid?”, “why are you laughing?”, “oh, no… oh, no, no, no-”

It reaches a fever pitch, but something beyond her frantic whining, something different, something nonorganic, is strengthening. “Can you hear that?” I ask casually. “It sounds like… buzzing?”

“Buzzing?” Or at least I think that’s what she said. It was really more of a scream.

It grows louder and louder until it’s drowning out my emergent giggles, and it finally arrives, those buzzy little robots that Bill thought were bees, and they’ve found their target, swarming around Bill, stripping her flesh from her bones as she screams, and then… they leave.

My laughter doesn’t die down, not when I look at the pile of Bill’s bones on the floor, not when I chuck the apple into the grinder, not when I see that Frowny’s blank smiley face has returned. 

At first, thinking of the look on the Doctor’s face when I get back to the Tardis only increases my mirth. 

But then I think about after. I think about being put back in the vault, and his old predilection for ‘no second chances’. I think that probably he has changed. 

But I know that testing that theory won’t end well for me. 

I sigh. “Guess it’s just you and me now, Frowny.” I roll my head back and shout into the ether. “Sorry, Doctor, but she was asking for it.”

We’ll be alone, together, at last. Maybe I’ll even think of some way to convincingly apologize on my stroll back through the doomed fields. Some more efficient atonement. Some artifact of hope, however fragile, that I cling to: that I can ever make my combined failures up to him. 

Only my stroll is cut short before I can begin it. Without so much as a peep, the mortuary dissolves and I’m-

* * *

Back where I started. 

Hands wrapped around warm metal. Not a speck of dust on my skirt. My neck bare, save the brooch I won’t take off until he acknowledges that it’s the one he gave me. The only difference since I was last here is a large rectangle of black metal taking up some of the square footage I usually use for dancing. 

If it’s strange to Bill and the Doctor, then I must be stranger, because they both stare unblinking at me. Bill looks like she might be sick. The Doctor is trying to bury his disappointment in outrage.

“What? Why are you both looking at me like that?” I pause; they’re still as stone. I lower my voice to a stage whisper. “Are you two trying to seduce me?”

Bill folds her arms. “You just let me die.”

I press my lips together and raise my eyebrows and nod accordingly. “And you’re… surprised.” I have to give the Doctor one thing. The fake-Bill was spot-on.

She turns to the Doctor, aware that she will get nowhere with me. “Doctor, she let me die, and she laughed about it. You saw it!”

“Yeah, that’s a thing she does,” he replies quietly. 

“And you think she’s ready to go out there for real.”

“No, I don’t. That’s what this is for.” He motions to the black device.

“What what’s for?” I probe melodramatically.

“It’s a simulation generator,” The Doctor replies, and I see fire under the resignation he’s putting on; the latter is fading quickly. Disappointment gets buried again under optimism. “That’s what you were in just a moment ago. You never left the Tardis. Total immersion - stole the idea from the Monks, but I rather think I’m using it for a better purpose. See, Missy, you can’t physically hurt anyone this way, and you get unlimited do-overs. I can adjust the settings and situations and AI however I like. You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty good idea.” He does look inordinately pleased with himself. Unfortunately for me and my composure, he wears it well.

I won’t admit it, but sure, it is a pretty good idea. “Training wheels in a snowglobe, then.”

“We’re more than happy to take you back to the vault,” Bill adds.

“No, no,” I wave my hands. “I’d rather hang out with you dudes Even if you’ll only be pixels to me.”

Bill rolls her eyes and turns to the Doctor. “I don’t want to watch her playing her own game of 1000 Ways For Bill To Die.”

This piques my interest. “Can we, though?”

“She won’t,” the Doctor dismisses. “She knows what’s at stake.”

“But you said it yourself,” says Bill, in a slightly pleady voice. “It doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t have any consequences. The only thing at stake is… probably watching myself impaled on a stake, or something.”

He’s still inscrutable. Afraid of Bill figuring him out. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

I fold my hands behind my back and squeeze them together as hard as I can. I remember every time he’s ever said that to me.

Can’t let the feeling linger. “So you’re going to send me back, then? Put me through it again and again until I figure out whatever you’re trying to teach me, without ‘accidentally’ letting Bill die?”

Bill has gone to sit on the stairs so that she can sulk as convincingly as possible. “Wasn’t an accident,” she mutters.

“No,” the Doctor answers. “Too easy. Too calculated. I know you, and you don’t make the same mistake twice.”

That statement is so categorically untrue that I almost speak up to refute it.

“Moreover, Bill could use… a break.”

She folds her arms. “That’s an understatement.”

The Doctor smiles, but I don’t think it’s at Bill’s meaningless response. “We’ll go back in time. My time. Subjectively, I mean. Back when it was simpler.”

“So I started out in kindergarten,” I raise my eyebrows, “and now you’re sending me back to preschool.” He’ll be impressed by my correct usage of Earth terminology.

“Basically. You’ve got to start somewhere.”

“What was Mars, then? Have I not already ‘started somewhere’?”

I see the look in his eyes. The one where he’s pleading for my unspoken understanding. So he doesn’t have to say what he means out loud. 

What would you do if you weren’t doing it for me?

Could you do it if it weren’t for me?

That look is my spiked collar, my choke chain. And I know why he does it. He hides behind others. Keeps those ‘companions’ around as a shield for the truths he’s too afraid to voice, the truths about me. A human could never understand, and he relies on that. There’s safety in not being able to understand. But he doesn’t even try. He doesn’t even tell them. If he did, he would invite perspectives he couldn’t control, and would damage his preferred filter of ‘seeing the best in people’. Because nobody else could see a best in me. Perhaps not even him.

If I am ever to find out whether that is true, I will have to play along. 

Maybe I don’t want anybody else to know how I feel about him, either. We both know the truth of this exercise. I’m to prove that I don’t live my life for him. That I won’t be good just because he’s asked me to, and will revert to my natural state of badness once he looks the other way. I’ll help people because I want to and because I could be good at it if I tried. He has to know that my days of lying are up.

“Fine, fine. Put me wherever you like.” Some old part of me wants to wink and laugh, because in a simulation, idly watching me pretend to help people, is only one facet of ‘where he likes’, and it’s certainly not the one I would pre-

Before I can even properly finish my thought (the prude!) he interrupts, his hand on the large lever in the center of the simulation generator. “Ready?”

“No,” I protest. “Not ready. Are you even going to tell me where I’m going?”

“That would defeat the surprise,” he answers.

“Surprise? It’s not about surprise, is it? You’re missing the point. You’re not dropping me in these to see if I can figure out whatever it was you figured out. You’re trying to see how I react to ‘moral stimuli’, right?”

His head tics slightly to the left. “I suppose you might have a point.”

“So arm me with the background information. Prepare me to make informed choices. It’s an ethical exercise, not a logical one. If it were, I’d have beaten you already.”

He doesn’t even disagree with me. “Fine. You’re going to New Earth. A hospital.”

Unbidden, my mind is filled with images of weeping, of whimpering, of slow and soft failures of life. The most amusing way to destroy a hospital and everyone in it. Seal the doors, close the windows, plug all the holes, suck the pressure out bit by bit, pull the screams out of hundreds of lungs, bleed the orifices dry, rip the eyeballs from the sockets, remove the skin in one clean go. Shatter the glass.

A beautiful mess. At least foreseeing the pain I could reap will help me to not actually cause it.

“Thanks, Doctor. A little preparedness never hurt anyone.”

He then goes into the details of New Earth, the timeframe, the events that got them there, etc. etc. He makes it sound so boring. I know he’s holding back the juicy bits for me to find on my own, but his recollection is sorely in need of some alliteration and onomatopoeia, at minimum. “Oh,” he remarks, like he forgot the most important part. “And there will be cat-people.”

“Cat-people?” says Bill.

I laugh derisively. “You could’ve started with that. The cat-people and me, we go way back.”

I seem to have actually caught him off-guard. “Really?”

The roll of my eyes closes that conversation for good. “So what am I supposed to be actually doing upon my auspicious arrival?”

“You’re to find Cassandra,” he explains. “She’s human, but, well… looks a bit different than how you’d expect.”

I sigh undramatically. “Cassandra. Different-looking. Got it.” 

“Any other questions?” he asks, twittering over to the simulation generator like he’s next in line for a carnival ride or something.

I smile blankly. “What’s the safe-word?”

He scowls and pulls the lever.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing I’m aware of is the lighting. It’s dreadful,  _ way  _ too blue, and I bet it makes me look stupendous, but it’s a terror on the pupils. Can I still get headaches if I’m not real? 

The second thing is the blonde girl next to me, who I assume is this month’s tagalong.. The fluorescent-hued atmosphere isn’t so gracious to her.

As the Doctor had said, the hospital ward I’ve arrived in is clearly a late Earth substitute, and the humans here have long-since outsourced anything that requires thinking. They’re the visitors here, and the nurses are the cat-people in nun’s habits; they mill about with clipboards speaking softly. Do you think anybody has ever tried to pet between their ears? That’s probably why they wear those habits.

I make an internal promise to give one a nice neck-scratching once I’m about done here.

“What’s this one got, Doctor?” his companion says quietly to me, like she’s afraid of offending it, motioning to a sweaty crimson thing, which is probably a human, suspended at a forty-five degree angle in midair. The disconnected monitor next to him beeps at a constant rate of once per second. Though its eyes stare out into space, unblinking, I don’t think he has heard her.

“That’s, erm…” I rack my brain for human illnesses that might result in these symptoms. It immediately becomes obvious that I don’t know any of their names. I was always more street-smart when it came to disease than book-smart. “Well, why don’t you ask one of them, I’m not a doctor.”

I’ve made the girl laugh.

A cat approaches us. “We are very pleased with his progress. Without our intervention, he would have passed weeks ago. Now he has quite nearly recovered.”

“Are they all like that?” the girl asks, more curious than polite. “Sorry, erm… ma’am. I’m Rose. Is this… some sort of ICU?”

“Oh, yes” she answers with obvious pride. We like to call this the ‘miracle’ ward. These were once incurable diseases, but we have been curing them for years.”

“That does sound… miraculous.” I remark. “How, might I ask?”

Something in the cat’s expression changes; a hardness emerges underneath the kindly demeanor. “That information is proprietary.”

“Proprietary?” asks Rose.

“So… unless the patients come to  _ your _ hospital, they can consider themselves-” I mouth the next word so that the patients can’t hear me, “dead?”

I can feel Rose seething next to me. “What if you’re full?”

“I’m afraid any further questions will need to be addressed to our head of public relations, extension 4099. I must get back to my patients.” The cat nods at us and leaves to do super-secret  _ proprietary  _ things.

I put on my best ‘justice’ face. “Now that is just wrong! Think of all those people out there, sick and dying, all because these cats won’t share how to treat their illnesses. Can you believe it?”

“Unfortunately, yes…” Rose says with a frown. “What iteration of Earth did you say this was? Fifteenth or something? And nothing’s changed.”

“The same old greed, just shinier than it used to be.” I don’t bother telling her that Earth #16 actually  _ does _ get better.

“Is there anything we can do, Doctor?”

“Well… now that you mention it…” I look back in the direction of the elevators and drop my voice to a murmur. “I think we should look around. Where they don’t want us to be. Come on.”

We leave the ward for the elevators. There’s a little sign next to each that says  _ ‘one humanoid at a time, please’.  _ I press the call button on one a few dozen times, and when it dings open, I shove Rose inside, following her in before it can close.

“Doctor!” she protests, surprised. The elevator might’ve said one humanoid only, but it’s plenty big for Rose and I, so I don’t know why she’s so offended.

“Floor, please,” a bland computer voice requests.

I roll my eyes. “Don’t take it personally, Rose. I just need to make sure we end up in the same place.”

“Well, if you insist…” She makes no attempt to keep any distance between us, so she can’t be that mad. “Where are we going?”

I ignore this, resisting the urge to tell her to shut her piehole. There are no buttons on the elevator interior, but a panel set into the steel opposite the door has four tiny screws begging to be loosened. Without even really thinking about it, I reach into my coat and pull out the sonic that’s stashed inside. 

It’s old and looks like he hasn’t washed it in a few decades, but it does the job. “Rose, if you were a cat, where would you hide all your secrets?”

“I’m more of a dog person.”

“Basement, yes, correct.”

“Access restricted.” says the voice. I sonic the panel again. “Access granted.”

Normally I’d close my eyes for what’s coming next, but I’d rather be a little squinty and get to see the look on Rose’s face. Smirking, I begin unpinning my hair.

“Commencing disinfection.”

“Oh, like hand sanitiz-”

She yelps when the disinfectant begins to spray from the ceiling and I can’t hold in my laughter; I  _ think _ the Doctor she knows would do this, but she’d forgive him for it either way. 

“Oh, isn’t this lovely, Rose? Nice and refreshing,” I say, running my hands through my wet hair. “Oh, don’t look so cross, you looked like you could use a blowout anyway. Hope that mascara was waterproof!”

As if on my cue, the spray stops and the warm fans begin to blow us dry. It’s a shame about the perception filter because, from the warped reflection in the elevator wall, I still look, to everyone else, like the Doctor. Oh, well. At least I feel fabulous on the inside. 

Rose isn’t so lucky. There’s only so much a blowout can do for a person.

The door opens and the sterile blue-white has given way to whitewashed half-light. Rugged, dirty walls are the backdrop for what looks like a science fair setup. If the science fair exhibitor had gotten their hands on some clearly stolen medical equipment and a rectangular expanse of skin with a face pinned up between a rusty metal frame. 

A weird little roughly-human-shaped alien putters around it, and the face’s seedy little eyes are focused on the garden-variety spray bottle in his hand. A news report plays just quiet enough to make it difficult to make out the words on an old-fashioned radio on the basement windowsill. They’re muttering, quarreling, about something, and as the elevator didn’t ‘ding’, they haven’t noticed us yet, until-

“Er, Doctor… I think we’ve got the wrong floor-” Rose begins to turn slowly, her eyes wide and fixed on the strange science experiment like the spray bottle is full of deadly poison. 

The alien and the disembodied (well, sort of) face immediately freeze up at our presence. And, of course, it falls to me to do the explaining. “Oh, sorry,” I insist. “Don’t mind us. Just looking for the ladies’ room.”

Rose side-eyes me and whispers, “Not a good excuse, Doctor,” and if this were a time for arguing, I would tell her that it was actually a great excuse, and to  _ grow up _ . 

The alien makes an embarrassed motion to shoo us. See, Rose, I was right. “Well, get out of here!” he squeaks. “Go!”

Rose backs up a step, assenting, but the skin interrupts her.

“Wait.” Her voice has the affected richness of someone who has spent a lot of time caring what other people think about it.

The alien appears to be confused, but too scared to question her about it.

“Is that…” she continues. “Do I know you?”

“Me?” I ask. “ _ Really _ doubt it. Possible, yes. But. Doubt it.”

Her voice takes on a strange hybrid intonation of panic and glee. Normally, this would be a great combination, in my humble opinion, but from her it makes my skin itch. “No, not you! Her! Rose!”

Rose edges closer to me. “How do you know my name?” No glee in  _ her _ voice, I see.

The face smiles wildly. “Oh, Chip, but this is great! She’s… oh, she’s  _ common _ , but she’ll do. So  _ this _ must be the Doctor, then.” I get the sense that she gestured a lot when she had limbs to gesture with. “New face… I like it.”

“I’m flattered, but really, you don’t even know how new,” I respond.

Rose takes my hand and it’s all I can do not to wrest it away. I remember when he was like this, all hugging and hand-holding, but memories are more easily accepted than motions. “We should go, Doctor. Whatever Cassandra wants with me, it can’t be good.”

“Oh, that’s Cassandra?”

Rose cracks a dreamy smile, like the rest of the world vanishes when the Doctor is entertaining her. “You know, you can be kind of stupid sometimes.”

“More often than you’d think,” I agree. It’s more fun to be an idiot when you’re pretending to be someone else. And it’s easier when none of it matters anyway. But mostly, it’s-

“Do it, Chip!” Cassandra commands.

With a sound like a great drain being pulled, the salmon pink wisps of Cassandra’s spirit ebb from the stretched skin and into Rose. There’s a smell, too, from the skin shriveling up, like perfume curdling. I have half a mind to re-disinfect myself.

Cassandra in Rose’s body gasps deeply, a hand on her chest and a look on her face like she’s just woken up from a vigorous swooning session. Chip blinks blankly at her, but I’m starting to think that’s just his face. “Oh,” she breathes, settling into the new vocal cords..

If Frowny were here, he’d be making the shruggy face emoji.

It might seem like I’ve failed already, and maybe the Doctor thinks so. Rose is who-knows-where and her body is currently being controlled by the woman he warned me about. I still have less than half a guess at what the cat people are up to, and my only surefire way off this rock would be getting stabby with the scalpels, and then I’d get chastised for  _ not really trying _ and sent back in here, or worse, somewhere else, for Round Three.

That’s what an idiot might think. Me, though? Easy in, easy out, and though I’m sure a hijacked Rose isn’t on the victory checklist, it’s not a one-way ticket to vault-town anymore. If I know the Doctor, getting her back was his priority, and his tiny one-track-mind probably focused on nothing else. But I already told him. I haven’t been put here to figure out what he did and make a neat little copy. His is the easy way out.

“Alright, Cassandra. Now. Any woman recently in possession of a body must be in want of something to do with it.” I grin brightly.

She looks puzzled, and it’s a well-worn expression on Rose’s face. “You’re not going to try to get her back? I thought… Chip and I thought…”

Chip holds up a gun.

I wink in his general direction. “I think we can work together, actually. I suspect you’re totally lacking any material possessions or friends, beyond Chip here, else you wouldn’t be hiding in a ritzy hospital basement, you’d be upstairs. You’ve got a plan, haven’t you? There’s something going on here. You could  _ really _ use my help.”

Her puzzlement shifts to suspicion. “I do know...  _ something _ . But why would you help me?”

“Maybe I know something, too,” I insinuate with a smirk. “Plus, you won’t want to stay in that plebeian body forever, now will you? You’ll be aching for an  _ upgrade _ in no time. We figure out what the cats are hiding so you can blackmail them. They stop whatever it is that they’re doing. Then, I’ll find you someone more suitable. And I get Rose back. There. Everybody wins. Aren’t I clever?”

“I don’t trust clever people.”

“Well, if you don’t want my help…” I pick at my nails, displaying my boredom. “I could try forcing you out of there, and I don’t think you’d like where I put you. Now. Have you had enough time to acclimate, or shall I have Chip fetch you a snack?”

She deliberates for a moment, but clearly when she said she doesn’t trust clever people, she meant that she fears them. “Oh, alright. Let’s go, Chip.”

“Yes, mistress,” he replies.

I can’t bite back my bark of laughter.   
  


“What?” they ask in unison.

“Nothing, it’s… nothing,” I sputter through my mirth. They look rather offended, but it passes. It’s clear they were no friends of the Doctor before; scorn cannot be a surprise.

Chip leads us through narrow hallways and up little stairwells like this is a familiar route. In contrast, Cassandra walks with the jerkiness that belies her time without a proper body. If anyone else were here to witness, she would be embarrassed. Out of curiosity, I consider asking whether she can still feel Rose in there, as Cassandra is, in every sense, an intruder. But Rose’s mind was probably bulbous and empty enough to begin with that two people could fit inside it without ever crossing paths.

Plus, I don’t really care. It keeps sitting on me, its weight increasing with every step, that this isn’t real, that it only matters insofar as it’s a way to prove to the Doctor that I can be good. That I  _ want _ to be. And there remains the question why I’m not trying terribly hard to act like it.

_ Enough _ . The awkward silence between the three (four?) of us is giving me too much time to go in these circles. Dwell on this problem that I cannot decide how I wish to solve.

“So… erm… Chip, now that’s a nice name. Is it a… family name?” I try to muck up an expression of interest.

“Oh, Chip doesn’t have a family,” Cassandra butts in. “Grown in a test tube, the lovely boy. That’s why he’s called Chip, actually. As in, chip off the old block, or DNA graft, as it was.”

“Mistress is correct,” he concurs with alarming gusto, like this is a legacy to be proud of. “I exist to serve her. It is an honor, of course.”

I skip over this scrap of personal information entirely. “And you, Cassandra, tell me something interesting about yourself.”

“Oh, where to begin?” she exalts, delighted that I have brought up her favorite subject. But even as I ask, ostensibly to relieve my own boredom, I fail to listen. As though this is a dream in the literal sense and not only symbolically, it’s like one moment I’m walking the corridors with them, Cassandra’s tinny voice echoing through the pipe-lined halls, and the next we’re stopped. A gunky bronze door blocks the path.

“Chip hasn’t been able to get it unlocked. But he’s spent hours here listening. There’s something going on back there, something very illegal indeed. We’re sure of it.”

Chip nods, looking crestfallen that he’s disappointed his mistress. At least I know why they had so readily accepted my help. “The sisters speak about it in hushed tones. I only ever make out a few words.”

“He’s heard enough, though, haven’t you, Chip? This is where they get their mystery cure. Can you get it unlocked, Doctor? I know how you like putting yourself where you aren’t wanted.” Even as she asks for my help, she accuses. It’s true, though.

“Yes, I’m very good at that,” I agree. The door sonics open without protest.

Behind it is a massive, multi-level atrium, with glowing green doors set every few feet as far up as the eye can see. It’s not unlike a very ugly and unprofessional version of 3W, which implies that there can only be one thing behind those doors. “Oh, now this is pleasantly spooky. Love the green.”

Cassandra ignores me and marches over to the nearest door. “You remembered the camera, right, Chip?”

“Yes, mistress.”

“Start taking photos. As many as you can. I want undeniable evidence. It’ll sell for  _ billions _ .”

He complies, and I follow Cassandra. Through the glass, only a faint human-shaped shadow is visible. The lights and valves on a panel beside it pulse and flash and numerous buttons beg to be pushed.

Cassandra’s confusion is obvious, so obvious I struggle not to laugh. She was expecting a laboratory, no doubt. “They’re… patients?”

“Mm. Don’t think so.”

“Then what are they? You’re supposed to be the nosy one. Find out.”

I shrug and press the biggest and reddest button on the panel. Cassandra gasps as the door swings open with a hiss.

Inside is a coughing, sputtering human, their face covered in boils and sores, scalp half-visible where the hair has fallen out. They’re held up by metal supports and sickly gas clouds the chamber. Or… ‘test tube’ might be a better word.

“ _ God _ , what is  _ that _ ?” moans Cassandra.

Somehow, there’s enough life left in the human to perk up at the sound of a voice, even if it is a very rude one, and they raise their arm, grasping towards us with those brittle bones encased in translucent skin.

I swing the door shut. I’ve seen enough.

Cassandra turns to me, now. “What is  _ that _ ?” she repeats, as if the human should’ve answered her the first time. “A patient?”

“Goodness no. It can’t be as innocent as that. Chip?” I call, and he trots over to me like I’m his mistress now, too. “What did you overhear the cats saying? What words could you make out?”

“Erm… ‘administer’. ‘Dosing’. ‘Upstairs’.” He squints. “And ‘farm’.”

Cassandra tuts. “Chip and I have discussed that last one at length. We don’t think they mean food.”

“No. Definitely not,” I agree.

“What are they, then, Doctor?”

“You haven’t heard any reports of kidnappings in New New York on that radio of yours, have you? No calls for medical trials?”

“No?”

I put my hands on my hips. “Then where did all the people come from? Chip, you were grown from a DNA graft, right?”

The lack of comprehension dawning on them explains a whole lot.

I sigh and continue. “They’re  _ farmed _ , dearies. Bred for the express purpose of being lab rats. That’s how the patients upstairs get cured. The cats have the best medical laboratory in the world down here, and the best part is that they  _ know _ it’s wrong because it’s such a tightly-guarded secret. Cassandra, it’s your lucky day.”

Rose’s eyes widen even beyond their normal enormity. “Chip, open the door again. We’re going to need more pictures.”

“Take all the pictures you want,” purrs a voice from behind us.

We all turn simultaneously. Clearly, the cat sisters have the ‘sneaking up on people’ ability.

There are two of them. The more senior-looking one smiles serenely, folding her paws behind her back. “We’ll take the camera. Novice Hame will escort you out. After receiving an amnesia IV, of course.”

Cassandra defiantly places her hands on her hips. “Amnesia IV? There’s no such thing.”

The cats give us pitying looks.

“What’ll you do if we refuse?” I ask.

“It wasn’t a request. We  _ will _ remove your camera and yourselves.” She smiles again. None of this matters to her. It’s all about to be nullified, anyway, she must think. 

Cassandra has fallen silent. I suspect she’s thinking through handing the camera over and going with them with a smile on her face. Leaving here in Rose’s body, unharmed, and letting the sisters carry on with their operation. It wouldn’t be so bad for her.

But I wouldn’t have Rose back, and thousands of humans would continue on suffering and dying for the benefit of New New York’s privileged. That most certainly wouldn’t do for the Doctor. Also, the cats’ smugness annoys me.

“My deepest apologies, sisters,” I say with no hint of ‘sorry’ in my voice, “but I don’t think that’s going to work for me.” I point the sonic towards a big locked-out switch labeled with ‘OPEN’ and ‘CLOSED’ and it flips itself in the upwards direction.

“No!” everyone shouts at once.

The doors containing the hyper-ill humans all swing open and a deafening alarm begins to blare.

“EMERGENCY. ALL PATIENTS RELEASED. THIS AREA UNDER QUARANTINE, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. EMERGENCY.”

“Well, I think we’d better run, don’t you?” I posit to Cassandra, and she nods vigorously and grabs my hand. The cats are stunned into stillness and their smug expressions are gone. As Cassandra and I run for the door, I ‘accidentally’ shove them back towards the jumble of humans.

With a glance backwards, I see the humans stumble out of their test tubes, reaching for each other. I stop for a moment, watching for the fallout. One of the humans touches Novice Hame. Instantly, her fur begins to fall out, and boils erupt over her bare skin, and she collapses to the ground as she screams. She doesn’t melt or anything, but it would have been cool if she had.

“Well, that’s grim,” I comment.

“Come on, Doctor!” Cassandra pulls me away from the germy fray and out the door with Chip following, speechless, and then she moves to push the heavy door shut behind us.

I stop her and scowl.

“What are you doing? They’ll escape!” shouts Cassandra.

“Isn’t that the point? We need them to escape!”

“Why?” she argues. “Are the photos not enough?”

She has a point, but I think she’ll believe me anyway if I lie. “Well, what if everyone says the photos are fakes? What credibility do you have? Imagine you’re one of the powerful people upstairs being coddled by the kindly sisters. Some poorly-dressed madwoman comes stumbling out of the lift and starts shouting about prisoners and human farming and so on. The cats are still up there, you know! They’ll silence you! Send you straight to the psychiatric ward, and  _ believe  _ me, you won’t do well in there-”

“Doctor!” she shouts. “You can stop babbling now!” She urges us to keep moving.

“I was wondering how long you were going to let me keep on,” I mutter to myself, and then we’re running, once again running, back towards the lift.

I hate running. That might be the place where the Doctor and I differ the most.

Something catches my eye and gives me another reason to stop. A grimy, disused looking computer panel, but a computer panel nevertheless. “Wait.”

“Why?” Cassandra asks in a bitchy, derisive tone.

It stokes my temper. “You are just  _ nonstop _ questions and criticisms, aren’t you!  _ Maybe _ I’m having an idea. You should try it sometime.”

She’s taken aback, somehow surprised that I would retaliate against her condescension, pressing a hand to her chest. “My oh my. You’re even meaner than last time.”

“Am I?” I sneer. “I’m saving your life. And all theirs, too,” I add, pointing a thumb behind us. “Forgive me if I’m not gluttoning all my correspondence with buttercream icing.”

If she persists, I don’t hear it, because I’m tapping away at the panel searching for a way to lock all the doors to the stairs and any other exits that don’t involve the lifts. There isn’t a preloaded security protocol just for this, but there is a total lockdown option. So I go with that, figuring that it’s easier to poke one hole than plug a hundred.

I know it works when the door behind us slams shut. I force it back open with the sonic and we once more head for the lifts. 

“What did you do?” asks Cassandra, panting. I guess either she saw and believed that I was actually doing something to help us, or she’s afraid of me blowing up at her again, because her tone is decidedly in ‘let’s not piss Missy off’ territory. If I could only show her what would happen if she kept on pushing me. It would be a lot worse than the quick death of contracting a hundred diseases at once. 

Somewhere in here must be a lab where they test painkillers. She could be their new lab rat.

Of course, then I’d be without a Rose.

We’re close to the lifts now, and I could just ignore her, but I deign to give her an answer. I do need her to eventually give up that body, after all. “I’m funneling them. The humans. So there’s only one way out.”

“The lifts? How’s that going to help?”

I ignore her, and finally, the metal doors come into sight, signaling our exit. Chip sprints forward, eager to do something useful, and presses the call button over and over. Cassandra furtively glances back towards the laboratory she once lived in and the blank expanse of stretched skin that was once her.

Briefly, I wonder how long it would take me to force her back into it. I imagine her crying and fretting while she waits for the sick humans to find their way into her home. And the sound of her screaming when their skin touches her, exploding all those exposed nerve endings into pain. Nothing to flinch in reaction, no insides to retreat to. Just burns and boils and pus. A longer, slower death than if she had a heart or a lung or a liver to infect. 

Rose would be back, and I don’t think she’d like the sight much, but we’d work through that, wouldn’t we? Companions tend to be forgiving sorts, right? Else he’d be through ten a week.

‘Course, it doesn’t matter, because reality cuts my fantasies short once again. The lift dings open and we all shove inside, making our way back up.

“Er… Doctor?”

“Yes?” I ask, before remembering that she’d already asked me her question. “Oh. Right. The plan.”

“There is one… right?” She doesn’t sound overly confident in me. This is understandable considering I only just finished with a detailed daydream imagining the cruelest way to kill her.

I smile at her, which has the intended effect of making her cringe. “We’re going to give them a taste of their own medicine. Quite literally.”

The disinfectant warning plays over the loudspeaker, and once more we’re showered in cleaning solution. I glance at Cassandra. She looks grateful for this illusion of safety. “Does that answer your question?”

Grudgingly, she nods.

When we arrive back in the ‘miracle ward’, it’s pandemonium. The same alarm from downstairs is blaring up here, too, and everybody is trying to figure out what ‘ALL PATIENTS RELEASED’ means and how they can possibly comply with the order to ‘QUARANTINE’ when their instincts are all telling them to escape. The fear swirling in the room is clearly too much to be assuaged by the sisters trying to calm everybody down. As such, we enter relatively unnoticed.

It’s my time to shine. “Chip, Cassandra, why don’t you go around and take all the IV med bags. All you can find. Whether they’re attached to a patient or not.”

They follow my order without question, not even a ‘won’t that endanger the sick people who actually need them to live?’. I head for the map I passed on the way in. The hologram only includes the visitor-friendly areas of the hospital, but with some fiddling, I get the whole thing to appear. Out of curiosity, I select the lowest floor. The atrium with the human farm is labeled as the ‘Incurable Ward’. Chuckling, I go back to the higher floors, searching for the room that contains the disinfectant used in the lifts.

I find it right as Cassandra and Chip find me, their arms full of squishy bags containing all kinds of brightly-colored medicines. They’re panting but unharmed. In the distance, I see that a sister has noticed us and is clawing through the fray in our direction.

“I don’t think she’ll be too happy with us, do you? Come on,” I urge, and we sneak out one of the locked doors into an empty hallway. Like the others, I bar it behind us.

The room is easy to find, and the vat of disinfectant bubbles when we cut upon the IV bags and dump them in. The colors don’t blend into ugly darkness, but stay discrete, swirling and dancing around each other like rainbow fireworks. When we’re finished, Cassandra turns to me. “Do you really think this will work?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to go back out and see.”

She grabs my arm. “Doctor. What if it doesn’t?”

“Then we sneakily make our escape, and everyone left in here gets exposed. Probably most of them die. Even the immune ones have to die eventually. But  _ we’ll _ be fine.”

She smiles and nods in blithe acceptance of this grim fate.

“At least we’ll have tried,” I smile. “Isn’t that all that matters?”

Her blank expression demonstrates that she’s never tried at anything in her life.

Clearly she isn’t going to express an opinion (maybe she  _ would _ rather just hightail it out of the hospital), so I shrug and open the door back to the hallway. “Well, what are we waiting for?” 

It’s worse when we return to the ward. A few of the downstairs patients have leaked up here before we managed to get the medicine into the lifts, and the healthy people are cowering away from them. “Oops. That’s not good.”

Cassandra is full-on panicking now. “So… so we need to leave? Right now?”

“No! Wait! Be patient! It’ll work!” I feel… stubborn. I realize that this confidence I feel isn’t artifice. It’s real, and with difficulty I admit that it’s more than confidence. It’s hope.

Well, okay.  _ Hope _ is a strong word. Let’s not get crazy. It’s only hope that I’m  _ right _ , so I don’t feel too filthy assigning myself such a sentimental descriptor.

There’s only a few of the sick up here, and they’re wandering towards the healthy, albeit slowly. They haven’t noticed us yet, but if many more make it up here before they’re cured, we could be in trouble. Hardly breathing, we hide behind some generic medical apparatus and watch the bay of lifts. 

All my worry, all my doubt, was for naught. The next person to come out is smiling.

Collectively, Cassandra, Chip, and I breathe a sigh of relief. 

Pride courses through me. “It worked,” I mutter to myself.

“Chip, did you bring that gun?” Cassandra asks, voice flat.

“What for?” I ask.

“Well, what about the sick ones? They pose a risk to all of us!”

I scowl at her and jump to my feet, trotting over to the healthy woman who seems shocked at her own existence up here. “Hey!”

She turns to me, but wheezes as she tries to respond; I don’t think she’s ever used her voice. I take her arm, not realizing until after I do it just how risky of a move that was. She’s still drenched in the medicine solution, which has a smooth stickiness to it, like diluted honey. “Come on. The doctor is in.”

(I really hope he said that when he was in my shoes.)

I drag her over to one of the sick patients, who is currently terrorizing a group of crusty politician-looking creatures. “You there! You want a hug, eh? Well have I got something for you!”

I shove the cured woman towards him. When they touch, it’s like the cat sister being infected downstairs in reverse. His skin clears, his cough stops, his slouch straightens as his body begins to work once more. I bite my tongue. It actually  _ worked _ .

“Well, go on and do the others,” I instruct both of them.

Soon, the ward is full of healthy people once more, and worse, they’re all  _ thanking  _ me, like I’m some sort of heroine. The cats’ fury towards me has dissipated, but I think it’s only for show. They can’t give off the impression that they  _ wanted _ anybody to be sick. 

Cassandra’s relief is the greatest of all; clearly she never truly believed in me. “You did it,” she says.

“Well of  _ course  _ I did. But we’re not done yet, are we?”

Spite flickers in her eyes. “You want Rose back.”

“Have you grown to like living in there? That’s a shock.”

She sighs, aware that she doesn’t have much of a choice. “If you’re going to force me out… give me a few minutes to find the most suitable body.” She makes to leave, looking out into the crowd, but I grab her arm and stare relentlessly at her.

“You’re just going to  _ take _ one of them like they’re a free shell for your little hermit crab brain? Have you been missing the whole moral of this thing? That  _ those _ are the actual people, and everybody up here are the sick monsters?” 

_ Did you hear that, Doctor? _

She nods. “Yes. Yes I am. Now let me go.”

I release her and she drags Chip along with her like a dog.

“Doctor!” I never see whose body Cassandra takes. I only see Rose, the real Rose, returning, gasping like she’s just come up for air after hours underwater, shaking her head and rubbing her eyes. When she finally sees me, she pulls me into a bone-crushing hug. 

“Are you alright?” I ask, the words like memory incarnate.

She’s slowly massaging her temples. I guess the lighting did give her a headache. “I’m… well, I’m back, so I’m not going to complain.”

“That’s the spirit. Tardis?” I ask, jerking my head towards the exit door.

“Please. I could use a good, long shower. A real one.”

“Me, too,” I agree. “There’s just one other thing I need to do here.” I motion for her to stay put, then creep up behind one of the cats, who is ashamedly removing her habit. The facade of the cats doing good work is gone; maybe she didn’t know what her superiors were hiding. Snickering to myself, I reach my hand out to pet the fluff on her exposed neck.

Her fur is not even soft. Like, really, she could use some better conditioner. But the look on her face when she turns around, teeth bared, is  _ totally _ worth the risk of me getting fleas.

With absolutely perfect timing, the hospital disappears.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s not like last time. I’m not where I was.

I’m laid across the chair by his bookcase, comfortably positioned like I might’ve just woken from a nap. I rub my eyes; it takes a moment for my vision to adjust after the bright lights of the hospital.

The Doctor is openly laughing. “Well done, Missy,” he applauds. It’s not even sarcasm. He says it without spite, without accusation. He means it. That, or he just really liked my casual humiliation of the cat nuns.

I sit up quickly, trying to look less vulnerable, but there’s nobody else in the Tardis. Just the Doctor leaning against the console, fingers drumming happily against the metal. 

“I ticked all the boxes, then?” I say dryly.

“You saved hundreds of people.”

“So, ticked hundreds of boxes.”

He’s still smiling. “You don’t have to bother with lying to me. It didn’t  _ look _ like they were just boxes to you.”

Oh, boy. Guess it’s time for the debrief. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“You did something the inhabitants of New Earth couldn’t. You saw life as inherently valuable.”

I avert my eyes and shrug, the promise of a scowl on my mouth. “Guess so.”

“I’m prou-”

I stand up, and suddenly something feels very wrong. “Don’t,” I spit. “Just… don’t.” I hide my face in my hands and try to figure out why I suddenly can’t look at him. 

But, like he always does, he can’t leave me be. Gentle footsteps shuffle towards me, and before I can turn tail and escape this hell, he’s at my side. “Missy. This is good.”

But how did it make you  _ feel _ , Missy? “Too good, maybe.”

“This is what you wanted.”

“I didn’t  _ want _ this.” He reaches for my hand. I pull away, thinking his touch will just make me feel worse, but regret it as soon as I see the fight still left in his eyes. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that somebody won’t give up on you. “I didn’t ask to start feeling this… this  _ benevolence _ . It just happened.”

He lets his smile come through, if only softly. He doesn’t want to scare me. “You’re good at it. That’s what I just saw.”

“You didn’t see all the alternatives that could’ve played out. All the things I could have done. The things I  _ wanted _ to do.” He would be repulsed if I told him. 

“But you didn’t do them.”

It’s as if I’m falling, and in accepting I hit the ground. “True.”

He doesn’t ask the unspoken question, the  _ why _ , but we’re both trying to think of an answer anyway. I go first. “This… horror, violence, pain… comes to me whether I want it to or not. Believe me, I usually  _ do _ want it, though you have probably noticed that waning. But still, even now, I indulge in it sometimes. Back in that hospital, I fantasized about all of the harm I could have done. And, well, you saw how it played out. I didn’t. So...,” I swallow before admitting what my own medicine could be, “maybe, I could try… keeping that up. Practice allowing those fantasies to be passing thoughts.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” he confesses. “I know these simulations aren’t  _ really _ reality, but you can learn. Learn to put real people - their real pain - above your impulses.” He says this like he’s been through it himself.

“They’re not just impulses,” I bite. “There is identity behind them.”

His gaze grows more incisive. “How do you know for sure?”

The question stings my throat too badly to answer. 

“I’m not asking for you to ‘turn good’... I’m not that naive,” he admits gingerly. “Only to think of the pain you inflict, and, even just every once in a while... to let that be your guide.”

I can feel myself wallowing, but it feels good, it feels necessary. I raise my voice, because in softness, I fear it will break. “And what of my own pain?”

“That’s what you’re feeling? Self-pity? After all the pain you’ve just  _ stopped _ ?”

“I don’t know,” I sputter. “I feel… misplaced. Nothing’s where it should be.”

He shakes his head. “Missy… do you ever think you might be misinterpreting what you call ‘pain’?”

_ No.  _ “What else would it be, then?”

The pause he takes may as well toss me into the cold vacuum of space. When he answers, his voice is low and coarse. “You don’t always have to put words to emotion, Missy. Or identify it at all. It can just be emotion.”

I feel tears welling in my eyes, which at this point is as familiar as hunger or thirst or exhaustion. He’s right, of course. “I’m not ready for more,” I dismiss. “Just… let me go. Just for a bit. Go off with Bill. You can be the Doctor for a while.”

He takes my hand, for real this time, and I try not to flinch. “I won’t push you. You tell me when you’re ready.”

I nod, and let him have one last good look of my eyes before going to collect myself.

* * *

I’m over it in a few hours. A walk through the Tardis’s cool corridors helped. Well, not the walking so much as the kicking of random pipes and pounding all the buttons I see. It’s strange, knowing that the Tardis is now the one place I am unlikely to be watched. 

Whatever it was that I was feeling passed quickly; the reward of a well-placed indulgence in temper. There’s enough plausible deniability for me to claim that whatever the Doctor understood of our last conversation was incorrect. A desperate inference on his part with no real evidence. The reality was like,  _ so  _ not a big deal. That old ‘feeling bad about doing good thing’ you thought you heard? I was just being dramatic. The old phantom limb acting up. It won’t happen again.

I’m not sure what he’ll think has happened when I reappear by the Tardis console. Some sort of deep and permanent revelation? Maybe. But actually, I was just growing bored. (Bored. Yes. That’s what we’ll call it.) I trot up the stairs and put a smile on.

There’s some flashy lights and sounds up here, and hey, Bill’s back! Just what I needed.

She sees me first and gives the Doctor a glare, then points in my direction. “Again?”

“Hello!” I greet them, wiggling my fingers cheerily. “Oh, Bill. How are you? Feeling better, dear? I’m  _ ever _ so sorry about my actions earlier. How can I ever make it up to you?”

“By leaving, to start.”

The Doctor tenses. “Be nice, Bill.”

My expression drops. “Is she ever going to stop bullying me?”

Bill laughs incredulously. “I still don’t know why you put up with her, Doctor.”

“An oath’s an oath,” he says. 

Well, if they’re going to be like that, they’ll soon find out that I can dish it as well as I can take it. “Did he tell you about the last simulation I was in, Bill?”

“Uh, no. I kinda just got here.”

“Oh,” I smirk. “I did  _ super _ well. Saved everybody. The Doctor was so proud of me. You should’ve seen him.”

“Is she telling the truth, Doctor?” She’s still staring at me like I might turn into a flock of buzzy little robots and strip her flesh from her bones. Even if I  _ was _ that boring and repetitive, that’s not even my style, so she shouldn’t be worried. I’d take my time with her.

There’s a very funny war playing out on his face in which he’s trying to determine what to say that will please the both of us. “Yes, actually. She was certainly competent.”

“Bit of an understatement,” I comment, mildly offended.

“Hmph,” Bill grumbles. “So she did what you did, then?”

He glances quickly to me. “Not exactly, no. It was a bit different.”

“You don’t need to be modest on my behalf, Doctor,” I say. “I saved hundreds of people, took down a vile capitalist healthcare regime, upset a few cats, and saved somebody’s skin. And got the girl. It was all in a day’s work.”

Bill still doesn’t look convinced. “And she did that all by herself? No Doctor whispering in her ear exactly how not to kill everyone?”

“No Doctor.” I grin. “I wasn’t alone, though. There was… somebody. Her name was Rose. I’d never met her, but… she seemed to be  _ pretty _ important.”

“Rose?” Bill asks. 

The Doctor nods courteously. “Yeah. Old companion of mine.”

“How old?”

“A long time ago.”

Bill’s the kind of person that will let somebody keep their secrets if she trusts them enough, but I’m the kind of person who will dig them up anyway. And, more importantly, his tone is enough for me to realize this is a scab I can pick at. “What ever happened to her, Doctor? You never told me. And I didn’t have much time to get to know her back in New New York. Spin her story for me, will you?”

He tilts his head to the side a little and steps back from the console, turning slightly towards Bill. I get the sense that he’s trying to prove something to her. “She used to travel with me. We did a lot, survived a lot. And then, she got trapped in a different dimension.”

“That sounds more like an end to me,” says Bill.

“Well, she made it back to ours.”

“Oh, that’s… good.”

He glances quickly to me, clearly blaming me for having to explain this to Bill, which he’s completely correct to do. “It’s a long story,” he dismisses. “She couldn’t stay in our dimension for long.”

“Saaaad,” I pout. “I certainly hope that doesn’t happen to you, Bill!” 

They both look at me like I’ve thrown daggers into all of their hearts.

“What? I said I hope it  _ doesn’t! _ ” 

Trying to get a handle on the conversation, the Doctor chuckles. “She’s just pushing your buttons, Bill. Of course it won’t.”

“No, ‘course not!” I agree. “Frankly, I’m the biggest danger you could be around, and your Doctor is doing a  _ really _ good job of grinding down my fangs. There’s  _ nothing  _ to worry about anymore, Bill.”

“Oh, yeah? Put her in another one, then, Doctor. If she’s really all bark and no bite, I want to see it.” She puts her hands on her hips. Shrewd is a good look on her.

Apparently I’m a circus bear, now, just performing for whoever throws a coin my way, but the longer I’m here the more prone I am to fracture Bill’s relationship with the Doctor, and I don’t see the strategy in that anymore. I unfold my arms and smile. “I’m all yours!”

The Doctor goes to tinker around with the simulation device. “Do you know how Bill and I first met, Missy?”

“Obviously not.” This was something he conveniently left out every time he visited me in the vault. I don’t think he wanted me to know he had any new friends until he started forgetting to not talk about her.

“I noticed her attending my lectures. She stood out.”

“Oh, because she was the only one there? The way you talked about those made it seem like you were beating the viewing statistics for Strictly Come Dancing.”

It gives me a stroke of pride when Bill laughs, for real this time, at my joke. “If I hadn’t shown up early, I would’ve had a hard time getting a seat.”

The Doctor smirks proudly. “She wasn’t registered, though. She came to my lectures because she wanted to.”

I can’t tell if he’s trying to soften me to her, or her to me, or any which way round. “Is that right, Bill? Did he ever tell you where he got most of those lecture ideas from?”

The Doctor shrugs, and he’s lucky the lighting in here makes it difficult to see if he’s blushing. He probably made it that way on purpose. “Some of them may have been adapted from Missy and I’s conversations in the vault.  _ Heavily _ adapted,” he adds quickly. This isn’t a surprise; I don’t think the university would accredit our unfiltered discussions.

“You think it’s a good idea to send her all the way back  _ there _ ?” Bill asks, but she sounds more curious now than apprehensive. “When I didn’t even know that my tutor was an alien?”

“Tutor? That sounds very intimate,” I accuse.

“Shut up,” they say in unison.

I make a ‘my lips are sealed’ motion across my smirk.

“Well, if not this, then what, Bill?” says the Doctor.

She scrunches her face up in grudging defeat. “I mean, does it even matter? We all know she’ll just be  _ pretending _ to be nice to me, anyway.”

“Not true,” I mouth silently, and she rolls her eyes at me.

And when she turns back to the Doctor and sees the ghost of a grin on his face, her eyes go all suspicious. “Are you sure you don’t have an ulterior motive, Doctor?” she asks.

“Of course not. And if you find the result of this simulation insufficient, well, we have all the time we could ever need to convince you.”

“We?”

“Well, her.”

“You said ‘we’.” She takes a step back. “You’ve been on her side all along, haven’t you?”

“This isn’t a ‘sides’ thing, Bill.”

At this point, I’m glad I’ve been disinvited to this conversation, because it’s rather cute seeing them fight over me like this.

“Nope,” Bill agrees harshly. “It’s fine, I get it. I’m just a toy in your toybox, aren’t I? And now you’re handing me off to the school bully so she can pull my head off and bend all my limbs in the wrong direction.”

“It’s not like that,” he dictates.

She goes up to him and looks him right in the eyebrows. There’s a bravery in her that I can’t deny. “Then show me. Show me that her killing me in that last simulation, among all the other horrible things you’ve told me she’s done, were flukes. And that you aren’t chasing a lost cause.”

He glances to me and her eyes follow his. It’s time for me to either bluff or show my hand. I don’t know exactly which is which. 

“This is real, Bill. I want this; I really do.” Well, I really want to  _ sound  _ convincing, at least, and I think I’ve done a fine job of that.

“Alright,” she says, and I think she believes me. I also think there’s something off. That this isn’t actually about me at all. Wherever I’m about to go is a vulnerable place for her. “Put her in, then.”

“See you soon!” I wave.

* * *

His office, if that’s what this mahogany-flavored room is, is quite a good disguise. It’s utterly pedestrian, smooth-brained college professor baloney. Totally not him. However, he hasn’t given me much time to be judgmental. Bill is already here, looking faintly anxiously over the bookcases.

I cough, and she spins around. “Hi,” she says breathlessly.

“Hello,” I answer, as if I’m just as honored to meet her as she is to meet me.

“You wanted to see me? Erm… the Doctor, sir?”

I grin at her. “Actually, I thought it was you who wanted to see me, and  _ please _ do not call me  _ sir _ .”

She looks sheepishly at her feet, but smiles too. “Sorry. And yeah, I mean, your lectures are pretty legendary. I haven’t missed one since I started working here.”

“Working?”

“Yeah, just in the canteen.”

“Sneaking in, then? I had a feeling you weren’t a student,” I chuckle, trying to make my voice sound sweet enough that this doesn’t sound like an insult. If Bill’s expecting me to try and be nice, she doesn’t even know what she has coming. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to tell on you. Big sneaking fan, me.”

“Oh, well that’s-”

“But you must be smart if you like to listen to me jabbering on in your free time. I’ve even seen you in my doctorate level seminars.” That ought to be buttery enough for her.

Clearly, she is buttered. I step around her to sit in the Doctor’s chair behind his cluttered desk. The framed photos staring at me nearly make me jump. Bill is following suit, taking the seat opposite me, so she doesn’t notice. “Honestly, I don’t have many better ways to spend my time. Kind of hard to make friends when you’re not in classes. They see you serving them chips, and it’s like you’re a whole different species.”

“So you’d rather come listen to a grizzled old,”  _ here’s your chance, Missy _ , “fossil of a man growl at you about quantum entanglement and James Joyce?”

She smirks again and nods quietly. I think she likes having someone who inherently understands why someone like her would prefer my company over halfwits her own age. 

I’m still pausing for anticipatory effect, and once it becomes clear she’s not going to lie about actually having loads of parties to go to and hot dates to endure, I clear my throat. “How would you like to hear me growl about the universe more often, only without the pretense of homework and with more rambling tangents about sixteenth-century philosophy?”

“Oh, I’d love that!” There’s genuine surprise on her face. It’s almost kind of endearing.

“Your personal tutor,” I muse, as if the concept is totally new to me. They’re  _ always _ my first. “Assignment one. I want you to come up with the thing that baffles you the most in the whole world. And then we’ll work through it together.”

She squints in the general direction of the Tardis. “That’s easy. What the hell is a police box doing in your office?”

I make a show of looking mysterious. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She walks over to it, like observing it closer will reveal the secrets I’m not telling her. “How’d it fit through the door?”

“Magic.”

“You’re just making me want to figure it out even more, d’you know that?”

I sigh; this is getting old. “How about this. I’ll give you a hint, but only after you complete my assignment. For real.”

Somehow, she isn’t let down by the request; she actually seems even more excited now. “Really? Okay. Might be hard to narrow it down, but I’ll think about it.”

It’s all I can do to resist making a snide remark about how there’s simply so much she doesn’t understand that it might take ages to find a winner. “Take as much time as you need. Well, within reason. Shall we say tomorrow night? Seven?”

She swallows and nods, still looking rather stunned. “Yeah. Yeah, that works. I’m… thank you, Doctor. You don’t even know what this means to me.”

“I think I do,” I answer enigmatically.

“Okay. Alright. Tomorrow night, back here? I’ll see you.” She quickly makes to leave, eager to go work on her assignment, and gives me another, “thanks, Doctor,” before shutting the door behind her.

I lean back and put my feet up on the desk. It could just be the smell of books or the ergonomic chair or the soft, real sunlight through the windows, but maybe Bill isn’t half bad.

Or maybe it’s the Tardis beckoning from the corner, or the knowledge of the little bird in her cage somewhere on campus.

I bite my tongue. Surely he has the Tardis locked out; he can change whatever he wants in these simulations, and letting me leave would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Plus, where would I go? It’s not even worth trying to open the door. 

There’s another locked door I’m more interested in anyway. Maybe he’s changed that, too, and eliminated the vault from the simulation entirely. Or maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he wants to see whether I’ll break myself out of it.

Do I want to even give him the satisfaction of going down there at all?

_ Is this the real reason I’m here? _

I sit and let that question fester for a moment. Surely he knows what he’s done. Given me a big red button that says ‘DO NOT PRESS, DANGER’. He knows what that does to me. He’d press the button, too.

It’s only half four and there’s little else for me to do until Bill comes back tomorrow evening, anyway. While it could be a minor amusement to go give a lecture to a bunch of hungover coeds on how to build a hydrogen bomb in your backyard, any diversions like that would necessarily be futile. (And possibly get me arrested, but there’s a thousandth time for everything.) My best bet is to do something quiet and inconsequential. Be an anachronism. 

Well, it sure didn’t take much for me to convince myself. Anyway, it’s a whole lot better than snooping around the Doctor’s office. I don’t want to uncover any more surprises. Or let his photos stare at me any longer.

Hyper-aware of the metaphorical cameras on my own back, I exit the office. By the bow ties and tortoiseshell glasses of the passing faculty and students, I think we are probably in the philosophy building. I’m not exactly sure where I’m going. Somewhere out of sight, I assume, and somewhere where some very advanced (by Earth standards) technology wouldn’t look out of place. Feeling rather like a lost child, I head for the physics department. If only I knew where it was.

I get a lot of respectful smiles and nods as I meander through corridors and skip (not literally, unfortunately) across the grassy lawns between nearly identical buildings. If anyone thinks it’s odd that my gaze lingers for a little too long on the quaint metal signs and arrows pointing to meaningless room numbers, they don’t say anything. How I hate this era of Earth where everything analog was made to seem more intellectual. A holo-map here and there never hurt anyone.

At least nobody tries to talk to me, though my scowl probably helps with that. The Doctor must’ve cultivated a sufficiently intimidating reputation here. More respect points to Bill, I guess.

Finally, near the very edge of campus, a three-story stone behemoth is calling my name. Brass letters near a handsome front door spell “M. SMITH PHYSICS BUILDING”. That  _ bastard. _

I head inside, and everyone in here is sweaty and smells like chips.  _ Definitely  _ no bow ties to be seen. I immediately leave.

I can’t help smiling to myself imagining the Doctor and Bill laughing at that. So I raise my face to the sky and roll my eyes. It’s a ridiculous treasure hunt, but somebody has to do it.

Gulping fresh air, I begin to walk around the building. There’s some stairs, half-obscured by forgotten bushes, leading down adjacent to the stone walls. The concrete is studded with little clovers breaking through the cracks and the railing is twenty years overdue for a coat of paint. Checking the surroundings to make sure I’m not being followed, I descend into the cool earth. The door at the bottom opens for me without protest.

My hearts begin to thump a little harder.

The cellar is littered with old laboratory equipment and waste chemicals nobody ever bothered to dispose of properly. It’s dim, and the small barred windows shedding light on the scientific detritus make an odd, mottled pattern on the ground, like sunlight through murky water. Like the Doctor was afraid that bringing any electric lightbulbs down here would somehow endanger everyone by giving me a source of energy. But it’s also sort of pretty.

The basement is a labyrinthine landfill. Around me are dozens of paths I could get lost down. Yet I’m more confident down here than I was in the university buildings above. Indubitably, my instinct leads me home.

And it looks like I have an intruder. A very pale and round one. I clear my throat loudly.

Nardole jumps higher than anyone could’ve ever expected him to, then, breathing so hard I have half a mind to offer him an inhaler, puts a hand to his chest in relief when he sees it’s only little old me. “Oh, thank goodness. Why’d you have to sneak up on me? That’s the worst I’ve been startled since last Christmas.”

“I love sneaking,” I reply plainly. “I thought you knew.”

“Well, next time, cough or something, would you? There’s a dear.”

I don’t bother to argue that coughing and throat-clearing are basically the same thing. “What are you doing down here?” I ask, trying to sound cool and totally not suspicious.

“Could ask the same of you. Just trying to get this corneal sensor recalibrated. It’d let anyone in right now. Hah. Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

Hopefully the odd lighting hides how tense I’ve gone. “Well, that’s not the end of the world, is it? Still, erm… lots of other working locks.” Four outside, one inside, in particular.

He turns around to peer at me through narrowed eyes. “I don’t know… when you told me to fix it, you did specifically mention that it could be ‘the end of the world’. Very grumpily, too, I remember.”

“Oh, yeah. In that case, you’d best leave it to the expert. Take the night off, won’t you?”

“You said you were busy all day.”

“Today I was, yes. I think we’re close enough to call it ‘tonight’ now.” I smile benignly, which is actually very difficult to do both with my own face and the Doctor’s, so that’s how the Doctor will know I’m taking this seriously.

Nardole isn’t convinced, but he isn’t who matters. “Okay. Goodnight, sir.”

“Goodnight,” I wave. I don’t know what he thinks he knows about what the Doctor does down here when he’s not around. I’m certainly not going to plant any ideas in his balloon brain. And I think this is one of those cases where anything I insinuate to Nardole, the Doctor can and will use against me.

And we can’t have Bill guessing all our secrets, now, can we?

The door itself looks the same on the outside as it does on the inside. Like any good bitch, I knock four times. 

The silence on the other end - a silence that begins innocently enough, then multiplies itself and in its advancing abundance turns sinister - freezes me still. 

There’s just… nothing.

Nothingness tells me something. Something I’ve failed to even think about. I’ll blame it on the oppressive reign of  _ Chronology _ , that insidious little worm constantly whispering in your ear that  _ now _ is the only reality of time. But I know that it’s really my fault to begin with.

The Time Lady in there, that absolute  _ buffoon _ , never even thought of the possibility of a future version of herself visiting. 

Do I really want to spoil things for her? Get her hopes up, when I’m the only one out of the two of us that knows she’ll never make it as far as I will? When she’ll cease to exist as soon as I prove that I am no longer her?

I rest my forehead on the door of the vault, wondering whether she’s doing the same on the other side. I’m not usually one to dole out hope; that’s not even out of choice, it’s just never an option. Good news doesn’t come to me when it wants to be spread. I think if she heard my voice, she would know it was me and not an imposter. I’m too slippery to impersonate. But what would I even say? What effect could it possibly have? I’d tell her it gets better, that she’ll make it out someday, that he won’t abandon her. Prove to her that he gives her freedom. Maybe even lie and tell her she won’t have to earn it.

A teardrop hits the dirty floor. I’m still here, and she’s still there. My body here is just as fake as hers is. We’re the same, only one of us is marginally sadder. Nothing I could say would be of any use. 

I rub my nose and turn to leave. I’m not going to get her hopes up.

It doesn’t occur to me until I’m back outside that, by knocking, I already have.

* * *

I spend the rest of the night and the following day in a stupor, sitting placidly at his desk. Upon returning from the vault, I immediately turn the photographs on it face-down. I don’t know where it’s appropriate to sleep, so I don’t. Absently, I wonder whether time moves the same outside the simulation, and the Doctor and Bill and whoever else he’s invited to the Missy-watching party are staying up like it’s New Year’s Eve, waiting until the clock strikes twelve, also known as me finally showing signs of life. They’ll pop champagne and kiss in celebration of their devotion to Chronology.

Or maybe they can fast-forward. Probably the latter. 

My eyes are closed when the crash of knocking comes. There’s a pocketwatch on the desk that I kept shut while I waited. It’s cold when I pick it up. It’s only when I click it open that I realize it’s broken.

“Come in,” I say, my voice a little off from disuse.

Bill’s smiling again. “I have your answer.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s probably not quite what you were expecting. I spent a lot of last night writing down possibilities, and I had lots, you know, but earlier today… well, I met someone, and she showed me something, like, extremely odd and slightly disturbing, and now my answer’s changed. It’s outside. I know it’s a bit different, but would you come look?” 

This reeks of a good reason for me being here, so it’s welcome. “Oh. Yes, of course.” I stand up and the sound of my bones creaking is nearly as loud as the knocking was. “Lead on.”

She walks a step ahead of me the whole way, and she’s tall, so it’s rather annoyingly difficult for me to keep up. I think she’s trying to outrun the falling dark. About a quarter mile away, she slips through a gap in a chain-link fence. It’s a nondescript stretch of pavement with a single flickering streetlamp. 

“So, you see this puddle?” She points to a shiny splotch on the ground. “There’s something wrong with it. And, actually…” she wonders, kneeling down and staring at it through narrowed eyes, “it looks even more wrong now. I can’t figure out why, though…”

Taking care to keep my skirt out of it, I bend to look into its depths. There’s an oily sheen over the top of it, but the light from the streetlamp isn’t making the effect it should on its surface. “Yes. You’re right. Look at the lamp reflecting off it. Or, shall I say, not reflecting?”

Bill doesn’t take my advice and looks at me instead of the puddle. “Oh, god, you’re right. It’s like…”

“It’s only... refracting.”

“Damn. Adding that to what me and Heather noticed earlier… that’s even more freaky.”

“Heather?”

“My, uh, friend.”

“Where is she now?”

“Dunno. We were here, and I had to leave to go meet you. I guess she must’ve left.” Bill looks somewhat forlorn over it. I think I’ve found the reason why she was so hesitant to let me see her at this point in her life.

“Well, what did you notice?”

She positions herself directly over the puddle and points down into it. “It might not reflect the streetlamp, but it reflects people. See my jacket? The pin’s on the wrong side. Heather noticed first, because she has a star in one of her eyes.”

“A star?”

“Yeah, literally. She said it was like a mutation. I just thought it was pretty, though.”

I look down into the puddle. Despite all logic, it surprises me to see the Doctor’s face staring back. I don’t see the strange asymmetry, though. He looks just like I see him. Even his scowl,  _ my _ scowl, looks just like it ever does.

“So it’s not a mirror,” I say, aware of how that statement is even more true for myself than it is for Bill. “It must be a window.”

Bill stands up, distancing herself from the puddle. “A window into what? If it’s a window, who is it looking back at us?”

“A mimic.”

She freezes, and it’s a few seconds before she decides how to respond. “Not gonna pretend that that doesn’t terrify me.”

The abandoned lot starts to feel less abandoned. I stand up and pace around it. There’s some assorted junk that came in on the wind, and black marks on the pavement spaced equidistantly in a circle. I bend down to get a closer look, and drag a finger through it. Soot. “Did you and Heather stumble upon this place accidentally? Or did she already know about it?”

“She brought me here. It sounded like she’d been looking into the puddle a lot. But I don’t think she figured any more out about it than we have.”

I hum to myself, then I remember that this is Earth circa 2016. “Did you get her phone number?”

Bill looks like she’s glad I asked. “Erm, yeah, actually. Do you think I should text her? I wasn’t going to, you know; we just met and… I didn’t want to look desperate.”

She’s made me laugh. “Were you raised in the ‘don’t call for three days after a first date’ hellscape? That’s all balderdash. You’ve got to let her know that you’re interested, love.”

“Alright,” she agrees, happy to have reason to do something she’d wanted to do anyway. She starts tapping away on her phone. She’s so engrossed in figuring out which combination of words sounds the most alluring that she doesn’t see me inching closer and closer to her before… oops! 

I give her a nice little semi-accidental hip-bump and her phone  _ plops _ into the oil like a stone. How else was I to figure out how deep it was? Push her whole body in and listen for how long it took for her to hit the bottom?

“Shit,” she says. “What - Doctor - what was that for!?”

I make a big show of looking innocent. “It was an accident! I tripped. I’m  _ so _ sorry, Bill.”

She kneels back down by the puddle. I don’t think she believes me, but I also don’t think she’s comfortable enough to challenge me on it yet. “Well. Great. Guess I’m getting a new phone. I  _ don’t _ think I should be sticking my hand in there.”

“Oh, don’t be so pessimistic. I bet it’ll be fine.” I’m lying here, I really am. I have no idea what’s going to come out of there, and what it’ll do to either of us. I want her to stick her hand in. I want to see what horror grabs her, yanking her into the depths, and maybe even follow her if she never emerges. If I wasn’t trying to prove a point, I’d just do what I wanted to do in the first place and push her all the way in.

I can’t do that.

The sliver of curiosity in me is widening. I could tell Bill that we’re done here today, and we’d go grab takeaway and a bottle of wine to share in my office and we’d paint our nails and talk about how Heather is probably fine and she  _ also _ just dropped her phone in a regular old puddle of water and totally isn’t on a date with some other girl right now. Bill would believe me. This could all go forgotten. I don’t know what happened to her when she was here for real with the Doctor, but surely it was more emotionally unsettling than a merry night in. 

“Here,” I smile, unsure of what I’m really doing or why. “I’ll go first.”

I plunge my hand into the oil. 

It’s as if all the pores of my skin are being invaded; some indistinguishable feeling is flowing into my arm and spreading throughout my body, boiling with my blood and coiling around my DNA. I’m probably making it sound worse than it is. It’s not painful. Actually, it’s not even unpleasant. I think it’s because it’s a familiar feeling.

I think the feeling is best described as  _ yearning _ . Not for a person or a thing. Just ambiguous, undeniable yearning. And it is ordering me to  _ leave. _

“Doctor? Are you alright?”

I stand abruptly and immediately know what I need to do. It’s not as if I’ve been pillaged, or possessed, or I have some oily parasite now. More like whatever was in that puddle found what I’d forced myself to silence over the years stuck in the vault, and now it has returned to consume me.

“Come on. We’re leaving.” I know I sound curt, but I can’t help myself from hurrying. I edge back through the gap in the fence, and now Bill is the one having a difficult time keeping up with me. “We’ll need the police box.”

“The box? What’s that have to do with anything?”

“You’ll see. I promise I’m not toying with you.”

“Doctor,” she says, concerned, like there were hallucinogenic drugs in that puddle or something. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

I look back at her, and, contrary to her tone, she looks fascinated with this thing that’s come over me. “I’m great, actually. Excited. You should be, too.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she responds.

We’re almost back when Bill’s name is called from the shadows. If it were up to me, I would’ve kept on, but Bill grabs my arm and stops me. “Wait. Please.”

I grit my teeth and try to calm my itching bones. “Yes. Yes, alright.”

“Heather? Is that you?” Bill yells. “Come over here!”   


The girl jogs over to us with a shrewd smile on her face. She probably goes to the university and is wondering what Bill is doing out with a professor at this time of night. “Did you not get my text?” she asks; the mundanity of their exchange is making me feel so much worse.

“Dropped my phone,” Bill shrugs. “What’re you up to?”

“Just… out for a walk. I do this most nights, actually. Don’t like being cooped up in a flat with seven other people, you know.” In the dimness of the evening, the star in her eye is even more striking. It’s a beacon in the sea of plainness that is the rest of her. “What about you?”

Bill glances to me like she thinks I’m going to explain, but, to avoid causing a scene, I don’t. “We’re, um… what  _ are  _ we doing, Doctor?” She must not want to say ‘going back to his office’ with all the unfortunate connotations it has.

With difficulty, I keep my words coming out of my mouth at a distinguishable pace. “We’re going on a trip.”

“Ooh, where?” Heather asks.

“Don’t know yet. Just. Have to leave.” I reply.

“And Bill is coming with you?”

Bill nods and sticks her hands in her pockets, trying to look modest. The September air is starting to get chilly, and it’s all the more reason for us to get moving.

But I can’t make Bill leave, not when I know her future self is watching for the tiniest inkling of my disrespect. 

And there’s something else odd. Heather is doing that unusual thing that Bill does where problems that would confuse and/or worry a normal human being make them light up and smile. “Why do you have to go?” 

“I just do.” It’s odd that Heather doesn’t bring up that I might have lectures tomorrow, or that Bill has to work, or that I don’t even know where we’re going.

“I get that,” she sympathizes. “All I ever want to do is leave. I don’t even know where, half the time, it’s just… it’s a feeling. It’s not logical.”

As another wave of yearning hits me, I realize what I need to do. I don’t even bother to phrase it like a question. “Heather. Come with us.”

Bill is surprised but agrees excitedly. There’s some relief mixed in there, too. Relief that she isn’t going to be alone with this extremely odd professor in his mysterious box. “Yeah! Just for a bit.”

“Okay!” Heather says, like this is the most normal thing in the world.

I start walking. “We just have to, erm… stop by my office. Oh, and don’t worry about packing.”

They don’t seem to care about that last bit and agree on the spot. These humans are so odd. Curiosity outweighs their sense of self-preservation tenfold. No wonder they die so easily. 

If Heather and Bill talk any more while we’re getting to the office, I don’t notice it. The feeling in me is growing stronger with every step; not in the sense that it’s taking me over, but that it knows we’re close to getting what we need. 

Silently, I hope that the Tardis isn’t locked like I thought it was.

Inside the philosophy building, you’d never know it was nighttime with all the students having pretentious arguments with one another, so we don’t look suspicious at all, and we aren’t interrupted on the way up to my office. I swing the door open with much more force than I normally would.

Bill and Heather are having a conversation with each other, but I barely hear the words.

“So, Heather, this is the Doctor’s office.”

“Cool. It’s nice.”

“Bit posh for my tastes, but what do I know.”

“What’s that in the corner?”

Their voices float back into my brain now that I’m in front of the Tardis. “Just. Follow me. It’ll all make sense in a moment.” _ I hope. _

I take a deep breath, and the door breezes open like it was waiting for me. Everything’s the same as it was before I got whisked away on this mission, and I half-expect the Doctor to be there smiling at me. He’s not, though, and somehow, that makes this better. It’s wonderful, this payoff after years of buildup. All those little tendrils of yearning smooth themselves down and rest comfortably; the boiling has settled.

Moreover, it makes me glad that I didn’t tell the Missy downstairs what was coming for her. This is all mine.

Or maybe it isn’t. One moment, Bill and Heather are in shock and awe over the Tardis, and then I blink, and Heather is replaced by the Doctor. Bill is leaning against a railing, looking at the ground and smiling to herself. Her voice is soft and vulnerable. “Thanks, Missy.”

I genuinely don’t know how to reply to this. Scratch that. Not only do I not know how to reply, I don’t even know how to feel about it. Or whether I do feel anything at all.

“You’re welcome,” I say.

* * *

I can tell they want privacy, or more specifically, to talk behind my back. And, frankly, I don’t want to hear whatever aspersions they’re casting in my general direction, so I leave with a generic smile before either of them can say anything more. 

I pick a door at random and find myself in a kitchen of sorts. There’s a tray of cupcakes out. I pick the prettiest-looking one and hop on the countertop, licking the pink frosting off the top. 

That ugly feeling after the simulation before this on New Earth is strangely absent. Actually, there isn’t much feeling at all bouncing around inside of me. Sure, the simulations aren’t real, and there’s no logical reason for me to still feel the yearning the oil gave me. But I’m still surprised when I can’t even feel its echo. I actually feel… content.

Yep. Content. That’s a really unusual one for me. Usually it gets pummeled into submission by anxiety or rage or melancholy, or, if I’m lucky, elation. 

But all those old friends are gone. It’s quiet in here. And, right now, that’s right. I reach for a second cupcake.


	4. Chapter 4

This is where it really gets fun. 

By ‘fun’, I mostly mean ‘easy’. You know those training montages in old Earth films set to inspirational songs where, in the span of a few minutes, a pathetic runt is transformed into the most invincible, untouchable hero you could ever believe under the harsh yet loving gaze of a grizzled, demanding mentor?

I’ll give you a quick rundown, but it’s not that interesting, trust me. At least, not in the sense that I learn much of anything, or feel much of anything, besides confident and cocky. It doesn’t last, I’ll go ahead and spoil that. But for now, let’s pretend like everything is going great and I’m on the road to redemption and all that.

After proving myself to Bill in the most faultless of senses, I’m shot like a pinball through the Doctor’s memories. 

First, I was treated to a delightful outing under the sea with my dear chum Clara. We were on a submarine, which was nice and cozy, but it was a little disconcerting when she kept flirting with me. Also, hilarious. I had made a point to jest about it with the Doctor once I got back to the Tardis, something along the lines of how his subconscious desperately picked his current face when he regenerated to get her to stop, but he put me in a new simulation before I had the chance to give him more than a knowing smirk. Clara, Clara.

Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t my playmate for the next one. We were at some fancy Earth rooftop party that I have a hazy memory of funding with a bunch of philanthropist types and I was wearing a tuxedo. The outfit was pretty eye-opening for me and I’ve jotted down a note-to-self about putting my own body into one at the soonest possible occurrence. Anyway, I also got to see Martha again, which was nice. When the Doctor was briefing me on this one, I made sure he knew that I remembered her name before he could mention it. And then I proceeded to be extra nice to her, seeing as I _do_ actually owe her for getting me out of that disgusting chameleon arch. So, between a distinguished night out with someone I consider a true friend (glossing over the fact that she also helped kill me) and a naughty old scientist transforming himself into a big swattable bug, I had a great time.

Back in the Tardis, the Doctor and I shared some laughs at this point, because everything was great and easy and I was turning into quite the hero. Even Bill and Nardole, who were popping in now and again, were beginning to come around.

The good times continued to roll when Rose and I and another woman I vaguely remembered holed up in an icky secondary school with a Krillitane problem. I even made a nice joke about how Rose was serving chips, because Bill serves chips, and that was a personal factoid about her that I remembered. Then I saved a bunch of kids. Afterward, when Bill rolled her eyes at me for implying that the Doctor has a type, I knew it was out of deep affection and trust.

Next, I enjoyed a vacation to Venice and reunited with some old friends I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and we settled it all without bloodshed (or blood drinking) as a simple misunderstanding. Because Amy and Rory liked me so much, we went off to play pirates together afterward, and I saved all those germy seamen from a siren that they all kept calling a mermaid despite the fact that she had feet. Like, guys, I’ve gone on dates with mermaids, and that wasn’t a mermaid. Anyway, Amy and Rory were really amused by how I could save their lives while also being irresistibly dashing, and I was especially flattered by Rory’s jealous glances. As if I would seduce his wife without telling him first!

I was beginning to think the Doctor was doing this on purpose when he put me in a ship literally running on human body parts through which I found myself in pre-revolutionary France. I had to disappoint the Madame du Pompadour; she wasn’t my type. But I was feeling like the kind of good person that doesn’t only save the humans they have certain biochemical responses to, so she was grateful in the end anyway.

Also, Mickey, love? You should have told him how you felt.

My suspicions were confirmed when I met Jack. I don’t even know who I was meant to be saving, honestly; the Doctor had given up on briefing me before each new simulation. All I know was that Jack said he was immortal now, _like me_ (the gall!) and asked me to dinner. I accepted with an exaggerated wink, and we really connected over the course of the date - me coming up with more and more fantastically violent ways of killing him, him telling me in scrupulous detail how his body would resurrect - and when he asked me up to his hotel room, I accepted, thinking I could try one or two of those methods out. But that wouldn’t have given the Doctor the right impression, so instead, when he tried to kiss me, I enthusiastically went to reciprocate.

The Doctor didn’t even let our lips touch before he pulled me back into the Tardis. He isn’t very good at chicken, is he?

After that, I was given a look of anguish, which he had poorly cloaked in humorous scorn, and sent to stop some greasy Daleks from taking over Old New York. Whatever they’d done to themselves this time had rid them of most of their intimidation skills, so I had plenty of mindspace to chuckle to myself over how often the Doctor has to spurn advances. And wondering, with no uncertain reason or motive, _why_ that might be.

My head-in-the-clouds look while in Old New York must’ve alerted him. The ease at which I was following in his footsteps was satisfying, at first, and now it was giving me too much time to think about those touchy subjects he didn’t want me anywhere near. So I was taken back to the Tardis and given the rest of the night off.

It was a boring, rather lonely evening, and I had insomnia.

You know how I said that it all had to come to an end? We’re nearly to that part. It sucks, I know. And sucks even more because, regrettably, I basically brought it upon myself.

Because I was having fun with this whole ‘let’s get Missy comfortable with not being super evil all the time’ thing. That’s all it was, the old boil-the-lobster trick. And, until it wasn’t, it was a nice bubble bath. 

It’s not what you think. It didn’t end because I saw the chef standing over me and decided I didn’t want to be boiled alive and doused in butter. I didn’t hop out of the pot and run.

Nope. I consented to the heat. And gladly.

* * *

“How would you like to go to Pompeii?”

It’s the morning after. We’re alone in the Tardis when he asks. 

“Pre- or post-eruption?” I ask casually, sipping my triple espresso. The Tardis’ mobile coffee shop has been one of our favorite haunts when I’m not out performing. It’s dark and small in a nice way. The faux windows lining the “outside” wall all play different scenes from random Earth locations so there’s no shortage of human-watching to do when you can’t watch yourself be judged for any longer.

Who makes the coffee, you might ask? Well, you shouldn’t be surprised when I say the Tardis is very good at having your order ready on the pickup counter when you enter the room. But wouldn’t it be funny if we made Nardole do it?

The Doctor is staring at the imitation wood grain of the table. “You’ll see.”

That tells me everything. I can’t keep a straight face. “Well, seeing as I’m not an _archaeologist_ ,” I emphasize with an accent that is not my own, “it has to be pre-. Good. I love a volcano.” 

He doesn’t comment on this. “Seems like you’re familiar enough to not need a briefing.”

I shrug, feeling smug at what I have chosen to understand as a compliment. “If you say so.”

“Are you ready?” He drains the rest of his own coffee.

“Sure,” I reply brightly. “Who is it this time?”

“You haven’t met her yet. Donna Noble.”

“What should I expect?”

He smiles to himself. “She won’t like you.”

“News flash: I don’t think any of them have.”

The Doctor seems like he might disagree. “Donna especially won’t.”

“I’ll try extra hard to be nice, then.”

“You might as well not. Niceness isn’t what Donna prizes in a person,” he adds cryptically. “You’ll see.”

There’s another espresso on the counter, unprompted, with my name on it. “Can’t wait to meet her. Now, are you going to drag me upstairs, or can I finish caffeinating properly first?”

“Take all the time you need.”

Something bubbles in my stomach seeing the flicker of trepidation in his eyes. He’s been putting off this moment. How could I possibly scare the Doctor anymore?

Maybe I’m just getting jittery sitting still here, but I can’t wait to find out. I stand and dump the fresh shot of espresso down my throat. It burns like foreshadowing. “Let’s go.” I leave without even waiting for him to stand, skipping out of the room. I want my eagerness to amplify his fear.

It’s funny to see the weight in his walk when I’m actually looking forward to going back into dreamland. Once we’re back above deck, I find my normal place on the chair by the bookshelf, carefully arranging my limbs so that I won’t be too creaky when I awake. 

He doesn’t even wish me good luck as he pulls the lever this time. He actually looks faintly sick.

* * *

I’ve never been to ancient Pompeii, but without being able to see Vesuvius from our vantage point, it looks enough like Rome and Athens and Babylon that I get the gist. Dirty peasants, fruit carts, warring smells of cooking meat from various street vendors, etc. etc. Everybody looks so happy. So unconcerned. And meanwhile, the late summer heat is begging for death.

I turn to Donna. She’s ginger. That’s all I really have to say about her. “Welcome to Pompeii!” I announce.

“Pompeii?” she asks. Her voice is almost unbelievably vociferous. “Doctor! I thought we were going to Rome!”

“Oh. Were we?”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to pull one over on me? Is this a joke?”

I shrug, figuring there’s more use in lying. “I tried, but the Tardis wanted us here,” I say, passing the blame.

“Why would it want that?” I don’t answer. She looks around shiftily, then relaxes. “As long as we’re not about to be buried in ash, I suppose this is fine. Not exactly my choice of holiday. But we can see if all those modern archaeologists are right, I s’pose.”

“That’s the spirit,” I beam at her. “Positive mindset. I like it. I’m sure the Tardis just wanted us to have a lovely vacation.”

Her brief moment of relaxation spoils. The Doctor was right. She doesn’t inherently trust me, but isn’t that really to say… she doesn’t trust _him_ ? This must be early in their arrangement. “It’s not eruption day, right? It’d _better_ not be eruption day. Can you tell me that for certain, Doctor?”

“Er…” 

“It _is_ today, _isn’t_ it?”

She doesn’t wait for me to spitball an answer, strutting over to a local across the street to ask the date. I can’t hear them over the din of the Romans, but can see the bad news sparking anger on her face. She starts to argue, then shout, and now she’s making a scene, garbling on about a volcano and danger and the end is nigh. Nobody listens. It’s humans, dear. Incomprehensible doomsayers are a dime a dozen. 

I roll my eyes and go to talk her off the ledge. “Donna. You’re making a fool of yourself. And being _terribly_ rude.”

“ _Doctor_ ,” she bites. “They’re all about to die. It’s erupting _today_. So yeah, I’ll be rude all I want! We have to do something!”

Well this has gone south quickly. “Do what, Donna? Tell them all to leave? Order twenty thousand people to safety, wherever _that_ could be? You think that will work?”

She doesn’t look like she’s considering whether it’ll work. She only looks mad at me for suggesting that it might not. “We have to try. Even if only a few people believe us. And you don’t know everything. Maybe they all will.”

It’s my turn to be short with her. This can’t be our mission. Save a couple people or not, Vesuvius is going to erupt, and tens of thousands will suffocate. Nothing I can do about that. It’s the big picture or nothing at all. The Doctor wouldn’t send me here for something so banal. 

Somewhere, there must be something wrong. More wrong than tens of thousands of lives lost. “I don’t know everything. But I know that this isn’t right.”

“What isn’t right?”

“Why are we here, Donna? I mean, why did the Tardis bring us here?” I ask, my voice raising. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

She’s even more heated than I am. “Isn’t it obvious, you _idiot?_ ” 

(That degree of insubordination is new from a Companion.)

“If we’re here, it must be to save everyone. And if they won’t listen, then that must mean that we have to stop the eruption.” 

I try really really hard not to roll my eyes. “Do you understand how difficult that would be? Stop a volcano? Are you aware of how ridiculous that sounds?”

She folds her arms. She hates me. She’s regretting everything that led up to her catapulting off into space with me. “I’m going to try. Whether you help me or not is on your conscience.”

“That’s great, Donna. I’m deeply glad to hear that you’re ready and willing to take on the Earth itself, but where do you intend to start? Walk up to the mountain and ask it nicely to reconsider? Jump in the crater and... ” I trail off when something across the street catches my eye… because it appears that I’ve caught their eyes, or at least the ones painted on the backs of their hands. In a flash of red robes, they disappear. I think Donna is talking, and maybe she has the best and most legitimate plan in the world, but I cut her off anyway. “We’re being watched.”

Donna spins around as if there’s binoculars pointing at us from every direction. “What d’you mean ‘watched’?”

“There was a woman with eyes painted on her hands. Pointed right at us. Staring. Either we look absurdly out of place - unlikely, considering nobody else is batting an eye - or we were expected, Donna.” I’m disregarding the possibility of the woman simply hearing Donna shouting in the street. It’s not very interesting, is it? Being watched fits better into my work-in-progress solution.

“How?” She sounds more incredulous than spooked.

“Maybe ‘prophesized’ is a better word than ‘expected’.”

“Oh… the Romans were really into prophecies, weren’t they?” She looks around like we’ve lost our friendly tour guide. “But how on Earth would they have predicted _us_?”

I start walking towards Vesuvius, keeping an eye out for any more of the... eyes. “Start at the beginning. Back in these days, they relied on soothsayers for almost everything. Official government ones. Augurs. Practically worshipped them, even when they were wrong. It seems to me that one lucky oracle foresaw the arrival of two weirdos from space in a bright blue box. And they just found out that they were right.”

Donna had been nodding along with my analysis, but now she stops in her tracks, eyes wide. “If they can do that, why can’t they see Vesuvius erupting?”

“Good,” I say, a smile emerging from my mouth. “Why, indeed. You’re exactly right, Donna. You’d think one of them, at least, would have seen Vesuvius showing the lucky residents of Pompeii the bold, confident volcano she’s been this whole time.”

“So… do they not believe their own prophecy, or are they wrong, or… are they hiding something?”

Funny, I didn’t think the Doctor liked conspiracy theorists. “Why wouldn’t they want anybody to know? Oh, Donna!” I make a deliciously worried face. “What if they _want_ Vesuvius to erupt?”

“That can’t be it,” she dismisses.

“Oh, don’t be so closed-minded. I think we need to find out what they know. Even if they don’t know what’s going to happen _tomorrow_ , they want something to do with us. Don’t you love being wanted?” 

She gives me a suspicious look. “How do we find them?”

“Ask or wander. Which do you prefer?”

We choose to wander, as she is growing uneasy, suspicious of everyone around us. She keeps glancing up at the mountain. I admit that it does beg for attention. It’s barren, naked, a bit of an eyesore. But there’s a certain respect it demands. It’s a bit of a cliche, I know, but knowing what lies underneath the ugly exterior… the heat fearsome enough to melt stone, the boiling energy waiting for the perfect moment to unleash destruction… I can’t help but find it beautiful. It’s an open wound spilling the blood of the planet. How could I not love it?

Silently, at first, we head towards Vesuvius, because it’s the only landmark that makes any sense to follow. The buildings and homes seem to have their own version of organization that everybody else understands, but to outsiders it just looks plain haphazard. A mess. At least we know that we’re looking for a government building, but as we don’t really know what that looks like anyway, it isn’t much help.

It’s only now beginning to strike me how very little I know of the universe when it’s not showing off. I know so much about it at scale. I’ve seen it being born and all its cells splitting and fusing and decaying and the whole thing ripping itself to shreds when dark energy rips off its mask of harmlessness. 

But in Roman Earth, I can hardly tell a restaurant apart from a temple. Bit embarrassing.

We turn a couple more corners and it’s quite clear that we’re lost. It doesn’t help when, a few moments after we decide to stop, the ground starts to shake, making Donna stumble. As someone with some solid experience with earthquakes, I keep my balance rather well, but make a worried face for the human’s sake. “I think you should go ask for directions,” I tell Donna like it was her fault we didn’t do that in the first case.

She rolls her eyes but goes to ask a child sitting on some steps which way we should head. The buildings are blocking the view of the volcano here and so my focus widens. Wherever we’ve ended up is even more bustling than where we arrived. There’s so much sensory input. Trails of music underpinning the vocal cacophony, perfume escaping nearby bathhouses on the back of the breeze, and most of all, the abstract feeling that everybody I see is making something with their hands, something they care very much about. It doesn’t feel much like the twenty-first century I’d been imprisoned in, but then again, it’s not like I saw much of that, either. It’s pushed upon me, this feeling of actually wanting to _be_ here. And I’m actually a bit sad that I’m not.

Donna returns, and it transpires that we were actually heading where we were supposed to. Now that we aren’t lost, she starts talking again, mostly comparing and contrasting everything we see to her boring life back home, and how she would make a good Roman. I concede to small talk with her. More than with his other friends, I feel like I’m learning something from Donna. I’m not a human expert, of course, at least not beyond where their vital organs are. But I see how someone like Donna, who thinks themselves so modern and detached from these distant ancestors, would find joy and peace in finding that nothing, truly, has changed. I wonder whether they can believe that nothing will _ever_ change. Or whether they’d think it a good thing.

Beside the obvious, she’s enjoying herself. I almost feel bad for her that she won’t have time to do many deep, psychological heart-to-hearts with her distant ancestors before we’re all dead.

She is just getting to the good part - “do you think they would recognize modern London if we brought them back in the Tardis?” - when we arrive at the augur’s. There’s no way we would have found it without knowing what to look for. It’s just another mass of stone. There’s not even a sign out front, or a door, just open windows and arches. I suppose they don’t get many unexpected visitors.

Donna puts a hand on her hip and turns to me. “So… we just walk in and ask? Like it’s the weather forecast or something? Can we even do that? Did people do that?”

“Yeah, they totally did,” I assure her, feigning confidence. “Why don’t you chat them all up and I’ll snoop around? See if they’re hiding anything juicy?”

She agrees to this plan and we head up the neat stone stairs into the building. Inside, there’s arches and pillars everywhere, and twee little statues perched upon short columns. Lots of hiding places, very few people to hide from. Just a sort of receptionist, actually. She smiles serenely at us. She’s not wearing red, and the backs of her hands are clean.

“Hello. What can I do for you?”

In a very lucky instant, I remember that I should have the Doctor’s psychic paper stashed away. I fumble around in his jacket for it and show it commandingly to the receptionist. “We’re here from Rome. My associate will need to ask you some questions, and I’ll be taking a quick peek around. Nothing to be worried about.”

The receptionist looks rather worried, which I suppose she should. Psychic paper fooling some psychics; there’s got to be a joke in there somewhere. “Oh… an unpredicted inspection again, so soon?”

Donna assures her that she didn’t foresee any issues, and I leave to poke around. There’s a dark curtain obscuring a doorway on the back wall, the only covered opening in the whole place. It’s calling my name.

I lean casually against the wall adjacent to it. I hear hushed voices through the veil, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Checking to make sure Donna is still grilling the receptionist, I nudge the curtain to the side. 

Five men are arguing, their words belying their whispers. They don’t notice me because they’re all facing towards the opposite wall. The one in the flashiest robes is pointing to a stone mosaic of sorts arrayed neatly that has a single piece missing. The dark marble has a pattern on it, traversing the bounds of each individual tile, that can only be described as a circuit board.

And their voices - I can understand them now. One of their stonemasons is behind schedule. He wasn’t ready when they last came to pick the tile up, but the group will be sending someone - the tallest of the five volunteers for this vital job - to muscle him into finishing it. Then, they’ll be ready.

I step away from the door before they notice me. Those are humans, sure. But that thing they’re making. _That_ is not human. Or at least, not human from this time period.

I go to collect Donna and she says farewell to the woman like they’re old friends. Outside, we sidle around the building into an alley where we won’t be overheard. 

“Why don’t you go first?” I demand, looking her straight in the eyes. 

“Why don’t _you_ go first, actually? You saw something,” she says. Her face is pale and tense.

“Yes, I did, and I’m hoping that you heard something. Answer me.”

She squeezes her eyes shut. “They don’t see anything for tomorrow. No prophecies of note.”

“And after that?”

Her tension blossoms into fear. “Normalcy. Just… same old, same old.”

I nod. There’s still something not matching up. “My turn. They’re hiding something. Something alien. Something they need to get ready as soon as possible, presumably for this afternoon. It’s like a mosaic, but it’s not ready. There was a hole. They’ve divvied up fragments of it, marble tiles to be exact, to many different people, presumably so nobody knows exactly what they’re building.”

“What _are_ they building?”

“It looks like a piece of a computer. A controller of sorts. A device for aliens to control life on Earth, maybe.”

Grim defiance straightens her posture. “Not if we have anything to say about it. There’s just one thing. Why would aliens have the augur do it?”

“Well that’s the easy part,” I answer. “All prophesizers believe their own prophecies. He saw what was coming and did his part in ushering in fate. It’s the perfect crime, Donna.” Pity I didn’t think of it first.

“But you said they aren’t finished yet? There’s a missing piece?”

“What are you suggesting?” I ask, nudging her towards the satisfaction of thinking she’s figured something out before anyone else has. AKA the universe’s best manipulation technique.

“We go and find the missing piece and prevent it from being taken. Smash it into smithereens. That’s how we do it, Doctor. That’s how we save everyone.”

The fact that she’s said it aloud first absolves me of provable guilt. Because there’s a problem. Something Donna isn’t considering. She’s conflating ‘alien invasion’ with ‘volcanic eruption’ simply because both of them are Bad. And sure, _maybe_ that could be it, but it doesn’t really add up when you think about it. Why would aliens want Vesuvius to blow up in the first place? To announce their arrival? To strike fear into the hearts of Earthlings by demonstrating their control over the planet’s built-in weaponry? It’s not the worst idea, but it has a fatal flaw. Actual recorded history.

Because Vesuvius _does_ blow up. Aliens _don’t_ invade Earth and kill everyone in 79AD. 

If we reverse the former of these events… would we cause the latter?

Holding the universe together in its historical pattern is novel for me. But it holds a certain appeal.

“Yes,” I agree. “We smash them. Haven’t you always wanted to see the look on a soothsayer’s face when he’s proven wrong?”

“Oh yes,” she says exuberantly. “But how do we find the missing piece?”

I think of the Doctor and his ability to edit these morsels of his own history to suit my situation and push me in the right direction. “Oh, I think we’ll find them right away. Don’t tell any of the soothsayers, they’d get jealous, but I’m basically psychic myself. Almost supernatural powers of intuition, me.”

She takes me for my word. Something in her memory, our history, is corroborating. “Let’s go, then.”

“One last thing.” The tall man who volunteered to go pick up the final piece of the puzzle has just passed the entrance to the alley we’ve been muttering in. I motion for Donna to wait here, then run him down, grabbing some fruit off a cart I pass, stuff a few satsumas down his throat, drag him into an alley, and slam his head against the stone wall.

In my body, I used the exact right amount of force to give him a nice three-hour nap. In this Doctor’s body, I might have just given him a bit of a bruise. Or killed him. It’s hard to tell.

Donna doesn’t question what I was doing, but I give her a thumbs-up so she knows not to worry. Time to go. I resist the urge to spin around with my eyes closed, pointing outwards, until the time feels right to stop and head in that direction. It seems a step too callous considering the situation, and though it might make Donna laugh, it just… doesn’t feel right. And it turns out that I don’t need to pick a direction so randomly, because I feel a pushing, of sorts, coming from Vesuvius. Or at least, I’ll tell myself it’s coming from the volcano, because I like the idea of it. It’s not like a ‘get away from me, tiny creatures, I’m trying to have an explosion here’ push. More like an urging. A plea. Help me, Missy, I know what I need to do and where I need to go, but seeing as I’m a literal bloody mountain, I can’t do it myself. And to Vesuvius, I say back: _yes_ , darling, _alright_ , you don’t have to be so desperate. Show me the way and I’ll help you.

Vesuvius presses at my back, and Donna and I set off. A calm has settled between us, and our words to each other fade. The chatter of the Pompeiians outweighs any idle small talk we could be making. Their individual conversations don’t mean much to me, but taken in aggregate, I’m starting to feel the tide of the place. See, Donna, what happens when you remove yourself from the spotlight? The best way to learn a place is to listen to it.

We’re only walking for a few minutes before I feel obliged to stop. I don’t see any particular reason to, or any big flashing signs saying COME GET YOUR MARBLE HERE. Or any painted eyes staring at me. What I see is a color.

The color blue, seen through a window, a gauzy white curtain lazily revealing and obscuring it at the behest of the wind. But the curtain isn’t over the window, which is wide and bare. It’s inside the house, covering the blue itself. 

“Donna? We’re going to check in here.”

“That’s just somebody’s house. Come on, we’re running out of time.”

I stop trying to hide my anxiety. “Just for a minute. I thought I saw the Tardis.”

“And what good is that going to do us right now?”

I go around the side of the building, looking for the entrance, ignoring Donna’s protests. I hear movement and voices inside. Its occupants are excited about something.

There’s an open door, and given that all the windows were open, too, I think these must be the sorts of people who welcome guests. I motion for Donna to follow me in. 

A family of four is facing away from us, gathered around something we can’t see and chattering loudly. The house is filled with marble statues on marble plinths, marble columns dot the room, and the floor is, you guessed it, marble. The breeze picks up once more. It’s certainly the Tardis behind the veil.

Donna stares at me with a satisfying combination of surprise and admiration. “That must be it!” she whispers. I shift to look around the family and, sure enough, it’s the circuit tile.

“Excuse me. We’re with the chief augur’s office,” I announce, “and we’re here to collect our commiss-”

I cannot possibly finish my sentence, because the humans all turn around, and one of them is the Doctor.

No. No no no no. Not the Doctor. Can’t be. He hasn’t done this before. Why would it be different this time.

This is wrong. This is cheating. 

His eyebrows furrow, but in confusion, not recognition. “I thought the chief augur was to be picking it up personally. I’m sorry, but… who are you?”

Donna steps in; she must have no idea what’s gotten into me. “He’s asked us to bring it to him. He’s a very busy man, you know.”

The scene isn’t processing right. This must be a glitch. I can’t play along. “Who are you?” I address the man with the Doctor’s face.

“I’m… well, I’m Lobus Caecilius. Finest marble-cutter in Pompeii.” His voice is even more uncanny than the sight of him. Can I detect lies in it as I can with his double?

“You’re not…”

“Not who?” His confusion is contagious. The woman next to him asks if he knows who Donna and I are, then turns to the sickly-looking girl next to her.

She lowers her voice to a whisper, but in the spooky silence her words sound like a firing squad. “Evelina, did you foresee this?”

“No,” she answers. Weakly, she goes to sit over a pit of sorts built into the marble floor, breathing deeply the steam rising from its depths.

“I’m sorry,” Caecilius says again, “but you… I don’t think you are who you say you are.”

“We’re not,” I admit. 

“Then who are you?”

My own honesty scares me. It’s probably just because I know he doesn’t have long to live. A murderer confessing her crimes to her latest victim right before the moment of death. “I’m not from this world. And not from this time. You know the lights in the sky you see every night? I’m from the blackness between them.”

There’s only confusion in his eyes. And fear on the faces of his family. No spark telling me that maybe the Doctor planted him here just to scare me. He hasn’t any idea who I am and he wants nothing more than for me to leave and to stop spinning impossible lies.

But I want to tell him. I need to tell him; I need the piece of the circuit board that he has, whether I tell him what it will do or not. 

“Because I’m from the future, I can see what happens today. The mountain towering over you all - Vesuvius - is going to explode. Ash will blanket all and choke every human being in Pompeii. In a few hours, you’ll all be dead.”

“H-how… Why are you telling _me?_ ” He takes his head in his hands, then glances back to his daughter. “You didn’t see anything? You haven’t heard rumors?”

“Nothing,” she admits weakly.

Her mother is defiant. “ _Why_ wouldn’t the soothsayers have said anything? They’ve never been wrong before. But you imply that they didn’t know.”

I match my tone to their worry. “They _do_ know. In fact, they’re in on it. I spoke with them. Lucius had a vision from Vulcan himself. Vesuvius is to be christened in his honor. It will be renamed a _volcano_ after him. But, dormant as it has been, it needs help. That’s where you come in, Caecilius. They’re using you.”

Donna is silent beside me. I don’t know what’s going on in her head to make her acquiescing of my lies. She doesn’t seem the acquiescing type.

“ _Me?”_ Caecilius says. He’s even dimmer than my Doctor.

“The marble tile you made for him. He needs it to help set off the mountain.”

“How?”

“Does it matter?” 

He folds his arms in a show of feeble skepticism. “No, I mean… how do we know you aren’t lying?”

I smile as gently as I can. “That’s an easy one, actually, Caecilius. That blue box you have in the corner - that’s mine. It’s how I travel in time. You haven’t been able to open the door, have you? I can show you the inside, if you like.”

I’m afraid he’ll refuse, so I go over to the Tardis and pull the curtain aside. “Take a peek,” I invite everyone. The familiar squeaking sound tickles my ears as I open the door. 

They poke their heads around the door frame, but dare not step foot inside. I try not to be too annoyed by the ooh’s and ahh’s. 

“I hope that was enough to convince you, Caecilius.” Why can’t I stop saying his name? “Because this is a very dire situation, and we are running out of time. Lucius cannot fulfill Vulcan’s command without every piece of the puzzle. In this room is the power to kill a city.”

He’s starting to sweat; it’s dawned on him how vital he is to the fate of his family, but he is only beginning to see the effect he might have on the world as a whole. “What do I do? Destroy it?” he asks raggedly. 

“That’s the question, Caecilius. You and your family have a choice to make. Vulcan or Pompeii? Do you defy your gods… if it means saving thousands of your neighbors?”

_Or do you bow to the vanity of the unseen, the unheard, the uncaring?_

Caecilius turns to his family, pleading silently for help, but they have nothing for him. He even looks to Donna, as if she can offer anything but a defeated look. Then he leaves the room.

He returns quickly, a dusty hammer in hand. “I pray that you are right.”

With a sound far too quiet, the marble breaks cleanly in half. And immediately, a low rumble begins in the distance. It’s gentle at first. Trees swaying, pottery clinking. Of all the things they’ve heard since Donna and I arrived, this worries them the least. 

After that, we’re waiting. Nobody speaks. Donna and the family sit quietly, and I tell them I’m going out for some air. 

There’s some stairs around the house that lead up to the roof. I sit gingerly on the tiles and the sun singes my hair. From here, there’s a beautiful view of Vesuvius. If I squint, I can see vapor rising above it. Besides that, the sky is cloudless. I’m only given a moment of peace before I hear the rustle of someone climbing up onto the roof behind me.

Donna sits beside me. “I don’t know what to say to you,” she says.

“Then why did you follow me?”

She sighs. “You lied to me. You _want_ Vesuvius to erupt, and you didn’t even tell me.”

“I didn’t lie. You didn’t ask what I was going to say when we found the tile. You were so convinced that stopping it was the right thing to do that you didn’t even bother to consider your own planet’s history.”

“Don’t be mean,” she commands me. “So what is it then? The reason for Vesuvius erupting being the thing that _stops_ the aliens?”

“Potential energy.”

She chuckles sadly. “And you’re not going to explain it further.”

“You won’t ask, so no. Did they ask you any more questions?” I probe.

“No. I think they’re in shock.”

I idly pick at the edge of one of the roof tiles. The clay is beginning to crack. “They’re not used to being so important.”

“I felt like an interloper with them. We may be the same species, and only a couple thousand years apart. Their world is just so small.”

“Does it make you feel better or worse if I remind you that I’m younger than the gap between you and them?”

She chuckles, which makes me feel like she might be more understanding than I thought. “You seem young. Way younger than that. Younger than me, sometimes. Like, not only in looks.”

“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.”

“Something’s still bothering me,” she says, though it’s not accusatory. “The woman with the eyes painted on her hands. We never saw her again. But you said she’d predicted us.”

I’ve been thinking about her, too. Wondering whether she’s watching me perched up here like a vulture. Imagining her role. She’s like Evelina, probably. Sees things herself and doesn’t tell the augur. With a costume like that, she’s probably in some sort of cult. “I don’t think it’s just her, and whatever she’s a part of, they never stopped us.”

“Why, do you think?”

“Well, they knew we were coming. Maybe they knew what we would do, too. I can’t say whether they knew _why_ we were needed here. But I think they knew we were needed.”

“Needed,” Donna harrumphs. “You manipulated Caecilius, you know. You _lied._ ”

“It was the best thing to do.”

“The _easiest_ , maybe. For you. What are you going to do when Vesuvius _does_ erupt and proves you wrong?”

I turn to Donna. She’s doing a poor job of hiding her troubles now. “Would you like to leave before then? We don’t have to stay and watch.”

“We owe it to them. They don’t even know that they’ve saved the world, if that’s what this ends up doing.”

“We can tell them that, if it makes you feel better.”

“It does, actually.”

There’s another rumble, and another, and Donna and I decide it’s time to head back downstairs. Caecilius and his family are exchanging worried glances with one another, wondering whether this isn’t just another earthquake. But the benign breathing of the earth doesn’t last long. There’s a crack like an atom bomb, and we all rush to the street outside to watch the show.

I gasp, though nobody could hear it over the explosion. Out of the crater, fireworks spew joyfully, escaping their captivity into the open air. I’ve seen destruction in so many ways. And I love each and every one of them. But volcanoes are art.

Nobody else is appreciating the beauty as I am. Caecilius is reeling at me. At least that’s familiar. “What’s going on? I thought you said breaking the tile would save us!” 

I try to keep most of the condescension out of my voice in favor of apology. That’s usually a difficult one for me, but his damned face is making it easier. “Yes. I did. And I was telling you the truth. There was no message from Vulcan; Vesuvius was always meant to erupt. The real tragedy would have been if it hadn’t.”

“W-what do you mean? You… you are saying that this is the _better_ outcome?”

I stare him right in his colorless eyes. “Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones.”

“What could be worse than this?” his wife demands.

The air is already filling with ash and I cough out a response. “I am an alien. Not from this world. But I’m _nice_ , you see.” I’m coughing again, but that might also be from deigning to call myself nice. “Vesuvius not erupting would have meant aliens - _hostile_ ones - invading. Killing you all, and the whole world with it. You and I prevented that.”

Caecilius takes me by the shoulder and I struggle not to stumble back. “So you’ve doomed us for the better of the world. Which we will never live to see. That _sounds_ nice of you. Now. Please. Get out of my sight.” There is a finality to his command. Doom is so easy to accept once you can see it coming.

Emotion washes over me. But it’s Donna who is stepping away first. I give Caecilius one last look before following her.

I stop.

This time, it’s not about _something_ stopping me, it’s not the pressure I decided was from Vesuvius. It’s certainly not the Doctor nudging me towards an action I would never take.

_I_ am stopping.

And turning. 

Because _I_ need to.

“Caecilius,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me over the sobs of his children and the screams of people below us and the booms coming from the volcano. I raise my voice to something of a scream. “Caecilius!”

Donna stops and watches, wide-eyed. I almost trip down the stairs returning to him. I take the hand I know so well and try to keep my voice curt. Professionally detached. Reveal none of the desperation ringing in my ears. “Come with us. Please. You and your family.”

“Come with you where?” The confusion that annoyed me earlier is back. It’s a blessed replacement for his anger.

Not _anywhere you want_ . Not _all of time and space._ I can’t do that. I couldn’t. Not if this were real, not even though it’s fake. “Out of the danger. The hills, where it’s safe.”

The children look at their father. Then, he nods.

If the Tardis wasn’t so blue, we might have never found it through the smoke. We stumble in together, grateful for the air. I barely have a thought to spare for this old coppery Tardis. It was such an important place for me.

And I don’t want to talk to them anymore. As quickly as I can, I get us outside the city. None of them seem excited to stay in the Tardis for longer than they need to. They scurry through the door like mice.

Caecilius hesitates, turning to look at me one last time. He doesn’t have words. He shuts the door slowly.

I let out a breath. I feel faint, and I don’t think it’s the smoke. I slump onto the console, not caring what buttons I might be pressing.

“You’re not who I thought you were,” says Donna, voice even and unreadable.

“I never could be.”

I think she is coming in for a hug, but the Doctor knows better than to let me suffer _that._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: mention of a canon suicide

Pompeii disappears, and I stand, brushing the nonexistent ash from myself. I lean against the mezzanine railing, peering down at the doppelganger. I clear my throat, then drench my discomposure in acid. “Hello again,  _ Caecilius _ .”

The Doctor sighs. “I think we should go sit down.”

“Oh, I do too. And I’d like several cups of tea, as well. And wine, maybe, if you can spare it. We have a lot to discuss.” I grin.

We find the library, because such a stolid place seems like a good buffer, and we both know that we’ll need one. I’m still breathing hard, much harder than I need to, considering these lungs were never filled with pyroclastic ash and smoke, and the extra oxygen is clearing my mind. I won’t be caught unawares. I won’t be at his mercy this time.

A flowery pink tea set awaits us on the spindly mahogany table between two mismatched armchairs. No wine in sight. Through the hologram windows, a fog drifts between jagged black mountain peaks. The library is so big and picturesque as to be obscene. A romantic castle abode in a prim Earth fantasy. I don’t think Beauty and the Beast ever mentioned a prodigious comics section, though, or contained several thousand scratched DVDs. 

I sit, cross my legs, and wait for him to speak first.

It takes him a while. “I saved him, too.”

“Him?” I ask, clarifying what I suspected earlier about Caecilius not just being put there for my sake.

The Doctor is looking at his feet. He must have known this conversation was coming. “He was only ever Caecilius. A marble merchant in Pompeii. He didn’t take my face, I took his.”

I pour myself a cup of tea. I leave out the milk and sugar. It’s strong, bitter, like it has been steeping for days. “Why?”

“We’ll start at the beginning; I suppose you wouldn’t know the chronology. Pompeii was very soon after Utopia and the paradox machine. Very soon after I had…” he pauses, testing strings of words in his head to see which doesn’t come back with an error. “After I’d lost you.”

Lack of sugar notwithstanding, the tea suddenly tastes blisteringly sweet. I’m amused. “You  _ lost _ me. That’s how you’ve chosen to remember it.”

“You died in my arms, Missy. You told me you weren’t coming back. What would you call it?”

“Being dramatic.”

“Please don’t be flippant with me.” There’s fatigue in his words.

I smile mockingly, but he doesn’t see it. “You know what, Doctor? There’s a certain way you frame things. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. You’re _always_ at the center. Always _you_ saving the day, _you_ failing to save a life. And you know what, most of the time, you’re right about that. You’re right to claim responsibility over everything around you. Because most people are your pets. You’re a kind, protective shepherd, and it hurts you deeply to see them struggle.” 

I stop to give him the opportunity to disagree. But he knows that if he did, he would be lying. 

“There’s an anomaly, though, in your selfish framework. You are not the ‘last of the time lords’. You are not alone, and you have never been, not before Gallifrey fell, and certainly not after. You tried to cling to your delusion, but you always knew you were wrong. Because there was  _ always _ something else, even if it was far away, even if it was dormant. Its gravity draws you in, insidious and unnoticed, when you aren’t trying hard enough to escape. It’s a reminder that there’s something else out there strong enough to pull upon you. You’ve gazed into its center, trying to discern what it is and why your own gravity isn’t overcoming it. Why it isn’t bending to you. But all you’ve come up with is that in its blackness, its impenetrable mystery, you love it. It is the one thing that won’t play nicely. The one thing that will challenge you to the end. You need it.”

These words are condensing the haze that has hovered near-invisible for the last thousand years. A cloud is forming. We’re standing in its shade, watching for the rain.

“Sorry if I’ve gotten off track here,” I hastily add. “What I mean to say is that you did not  _ lose _ me that day on Earth. You burned my body, but you knew you could not lose me. I cannot be lost. I can only leave. Do you understand?”

His voice is curiously certain. “I think so.”

“You think you’ve learned, then? That I actually exist when you aren’t around? That I… that I choose to be around you because I  _ want _ to be, not because you’re as irresistible as you think you are?”

He shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “I haven’t  _ learned _ , Missy. I was never that ignorant.”

“That’s rich.”

“You choose to be around me,” he repeats. “Did you know that, one day, it would come to this?”

If I’d ever hoped for that, I couldn’t admit it, not even now. I shake my head no. 

“You should understand, then,” he says, his voice growing stronger. “It might not have seemed this way, even to me, when I came into the Tardis and asked you if you wanted the chance to earn my trust. As if ‘trust’ was really what this was about. But my intentions were never to change you. I didn’t have some surreptitious goal of turning you good. I only wanted to make an effort.” He smiles to himself. “To make you see what I had seen in you since the beginning. I was only trying to coax out what had always been there and could never be destroyed, no matter how hard you tried.”

“And I did try, didn’t I?” I laugh.

Outside, snow begins to fall. The lamps in the library flick on in response to the subtle loss of light. I take another long draught of tea. It’s just as hot as when it was first poured.

“You were speaking of Pompeii,” I remind him.

He rouses from a cold stupor. He really should have the tea. I go ahead and pour for him, dumping in no fewer than six sugar cubes.

“Right. I know you disagree with my wording, but I had to show you where I was when Donna and I arrived in Pompeii. I wasn’t well. I was deep under a violent surface and there was a storm above me. I was holding my breath as long as I could, knowing that with each passing second I was growing weaker and more desperate for air. Actually,” he chuckles to himself, and it isn’t a sad, regretful sound, but one of genuine amusement, “that’s about where I was most of the time with that regeneration. The conditions above me were always changing, but still I hid where I thought it was safe.”

I smile; memory hitting me hard. “I was the lightning that struck the waves.”

“You were more than just that,” he rebuts. 

“But you’re, what, two regenerations past that now, right? You missed me on the last one. And now I’m back, and you’ve kept me.” He nods. “You’ve come up for air. You’re floating, watching the storm rage above, careless for whether it will strike you.”

He shifts, angling towards me. “You could even say I want it to.”

“I  _ know _ you do, Doctor. But there’s no true satisfaction in getting what you’ve asked for, when you want it, is there?” I say. “You can’t know when lightning will strike just by looking for it.”

He stiffens, and sips the tea, making a disgusted face at the boiling, cloying sweetness. “Maybe so. But if you ask it… will it tell you?”

“Maybe it doesn’t know when the conditions will be right to strike either.”

I  _ don’t  _ know. That’s the truth. And that uncertainty is difficult for him to live with.

“Stop distracting me,” he says. “I stepped out into Pompeii believing that it was a fixed point in time. So I knew that I was to allow everybody to die. Donna acted curt and frustrated with me as she did with you, if not worse. And when I met Caecilius, he meant little to me. He had to, since he had to die. I’ll spare you the details of how I made - yes, made - Vesuvius erupt. But after I did… I ran. I couldn’t bear to look into their eyes knowing that I was killing them.”

Suddenly, I’m back in the vault and he is telling me his stories. “But you said you saved them.”

“I did. Because Donna made me.”

I let that thought settle; icicles are forming on the eaves outside the windows. His expression is grateful. His memory for emotion was always so good.

“Waking up with this face wasn’t my unconscious way of honoring him,” he says. “It’s more self-centered than that, unintentional as it was. A reminder. A promise that I’ll always do what I can.”

I nod. I’m afraid to speak. I know I’ll either be too saccharine or too callous. I don’t know which.

But he doesn’t seem to be expecting a response. “And that leads us to you.” He looks at me, challenging me with his very visage.

No, not just that. With his inheritance. With that which he planted ages ago and finally reaped.

“Yes. To me,” I say.

“What did you think Caecilius was?”

“Not a coincidence,” I assert. “But something I couldn’t understand, I’ll give you that. And something I didn’t have to try to understand, because I knew you would explain it afterwards.”

The Doctor doesn’t explain, but takes a guess at my reasoning. “You saved him because he looked like me.”

“I don’t think I would distill it so easily. It’s not like he reminded me of you in any other way.”

“Then what? You saved a random man and his family just because you wanted to?” goes his accusation that I’m lying. His terrible sarcasm. I thought he was over that with me.

“What are you implying? I have nothing to hide,” I dismiss. “I certainly won’t lie to you and say it was out of blind goodwill alone, that I would have done it for any old human. Sure, Doctor. It was because he looked like you, and I knew you were watching. It was manipulation. Logical. I felt nothing.”

The Doctor sighs. Apparently, veiled truth is all I’m allowed to give. “If you were in my place, and I were in yours, what would you do? Right now; I don’t mean in a simulation. Would you try to make me better? Would you think it possible?”

I chuckle derisively. “I don’t think there’s anything to gain from that question. What you should be asking is its inverse.”

“Which is?”

“Why I’ve never tried harder to show you that you can be bad, too.”

Something blossoms deeply within me when he asks without sounding dismissive. When I can tell that he genuinely wants to know. “And why is that?”

“Because I didn’t need to,” I say softly. “You know well enough yourself.”

He sighs. “Yes.”

I give myself a minute of a daydream, my oldest one. Us being like me, together. And then I squeeze my eyes together, locking it away. “Have you considered the possibility that I’ve never needed you to show me that I could be good?”

He hides his face with a hand, but I can see a smile blistering across it anyway. “That’s what I’d always hoped for.”

“Is it, though?” I ask pointedly. “Do you know what that would mean, Doctor?”

The snow has grown so heavy, the flakes spilling and weeping from the hanging gloom, that we can no longer see the obsidian peaks. “That, over and over, I have  _ chosen _ to do bad. Because that’s the way I summon you.”

He answers immediately; he’s dwelled on this before. “Then that’s our misunderstanding, Missy.”

“Our misunderstanding?  _ I’m  _ wrong, then? I  _ don’t _ have to be the villain for you to thwart to see you every now and again? History tells us otherwise.”

He’s trying to keep the accusation out of his voice once more. “Did you ever  _ try _ to get my attention by being good?”

I dodge the question. “If I did, you’d have never noticed. You don’t think anybody else  _ can _ do as good as you.”

No answer to this.

“Who comes running when  _ you’re _ bad?” I ask calmly.

The room is still; only heartbeats break the silence. “You do.”

“I  _ want _ to.” I want to more, I’ve wanted to every day of our lives. I want to watch him. The truth of him.

He finally turns enough so that we can look each other in the eyes. “And I want you to.”

“Then show me. Show me a time you wanted me to come and I didn’t.”

His breath comes out somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “We can’t just… I can’t just toss you into one of my deepest regrets. This isn’t… this isn’t easy, it’s not…”

“And Pompeii was?”

“With Pompeii, I could at least tell myself that it had been a fixed point in time. That I did the right thing, because I’d saved a planet,” he says with finality. “This is different.”

I glance over to him; he looks haunted. “So that’s it, then. I get to see where the Doctor fails.”

“Yes,” he admits softly. He reaches for the tea, brings the cup to his lips, then thinks better of it, blowing waves across its surface, though he must know it’s not too hot anymore. “I want you to go there because I want you to show me what I should have done.”

I freeze. That’s not what I had asked for.

But if it’s what he wants me to see… I don’t know how long it’s been when he speaks again. The Tardis is so destructive in that way. It won’t allow for a rhythm. I wish the lights in the library would shut off, and the curtains would swing closed and hide the veneer of outdoors. The cold would stop pretending to be the result of snow and admit that it’s just the abyss sneaking in.

“Does it amuse you to hear that Mars, of all places, was the gate to my own path to self-destruction?” He looks at me, suspicious that I might not react truthfully.

“A little,” I admit. “Are you implying I’m currently walking that same path?”

“Of course not,” he hastily answers. “It’s not the same. I had stumbled upon another fixed point in time. And I knew that as soon as I arrived on that base, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I knew it would spell pain for me.”

“You talk about fixed points in time as if they were factual,” I dismiss. “You did it with Pompeii, too. You might look at what they have in common.”

“I’ve only ever seen proof that they are. And don’t patronize me; I know the commonality. I can’t save everybody.”

“Again, you’re making this about  _ you _ ! I didn’t mean that your inability to win was the only commonality. But before I accuse you of anything else-” though I would love nothing more but to do that very thing -“get on with it. Tell me what to expect.”

He’s clearly grateful to have moved to a more concrete topic. “The first human colony on Mars. 2059. I don’t know whether that means anything to you. But the captain there… her granddaughter changes the fate of humanity. She’s the first human to reach beyond the Milky Way. The universe would not be the same without her actions.”

“Her…  _ actions _ . Not her. Which action, Doctor?” I pry.

He swallows. “Her death.”

I stand. “I think that’s all I needed to hear.”

“You don’t want me to explain anything else?”

I grin at him and offer my hand to help him up from the chair. “Nope. I get it. Come on. Time for me to go be  _ your _ hero.”

“One more thing,” he says, looking up at me. “Her name is Adelaide.”

* * *

I squint from the glow of ubiquitous orange. The human colony is far in the distance; you could mistake it for a strange-looking rock, if not for the massive space shuttle stationed near enough to it for a hasty escape.

He must have come here to be alone. He said he knew where he was once he arrived on the  _ base _ , not on the planet itself. Meaning that he had no idea what was in store for out here. This was to be a nice stroll in the wilderness. I’m not cold, and I can breathe, and walking does not entail floating several feet above the ground between steps, so I’m wearing a spacesuit. It’s probably orange, too.

I’ve been to Mars before. Obviously. I’ve felt the false solitude of the planet’s surface. The way it tricks you into thinking it’s barren. A lifeless wasteland. The Doctor should too have known that there was never a time in its history that Mars has been empty.

I give the Tardis a final look, then commit its location among the rock formations to memory. Just as I’m about to begin the likely long walk to the Mars base, though, I’m teleported in.

The base is standard enough on the inside. Shiny, white, clean, you get it. There’s a group of humans sitting and/or leaning casually against various surfaces, smiling and chatting with me. They all look happy and relaxed. I don’t know how far forward after my arrival I’ve time traveled, but they laugh cheerily as if I’ve just told an excellent joke. 

I can’t complain about this turn of events. I didn’t have to do anything; the Doctor made us all pals without me even needing to ask. That tells me two things. One, he no longer doubts my ability to make friends. Two, he had to establish that it was important for  _ them  _ to trust me. 

Well, okay, I can think of a third one too. He’s impatient. He doesn’t want to watch me befriending these people he knows I’ll have to kill. He either trusts that whatever I choose to do here will mean something to me in the end, without me having to build relationships first, or he doesn’t even care if it means anything to me. Which is very selfish, Doctor. But I get it.

It’s practically beamed into my brain that the human standing at the center console with folded arms is Adelaide. She has an air of nobility, of seriousness, to her, though her outward expressions are currently good-natured. She clears her throat and speaks firmly, as if giving a toast. “We don’t have any champagne here, for obvious reasons,” she says with a sly smile. “But this is a momentous day, communications blackout to Earth be damned. So we’ll have to use water.”

“I’ve got it,” the youngest-looking human says. He gets up from our little circle and leaves through one of the sliding doors.

I don’t really know what to say, but the humans are looking at me adoringly anyway. It’s creepy. “Thanks, Adelaide. You’ll have to tell everybody back home all about me.”

“You’re not staying?” says one of the other humans.

“Think of me as your special treat for being the first humans on Mars,” I lie. They don’t need to know about the Victorians.

Adelaide is nonplussed; she shrugs. I get the feeling that she wouldn’t want me to stay even if everybody else begged. “Regardless, Doctor, we’re grateful for you. This is truly the cherry on top of a successful mission. To know that there are friendly faces out there among the stars; that what we’re headed for isn’t unrelenting danger. That we can find comfort in the universe. It’s what I’ve lived my life for.”

I grin charmingly. “There’s goodness in the darkness if one is courageous enough to pierce it.”

“It means a lot to hear you say that. Now, where is Roman with our toast?”

Before she can do so much as radio him, we’ve fast-forwarded once more.

The celebration is gone. Unless you count the blaring alarm as dance music and red flashing lights as strobes, and I don’t think anybody would appreciate me doing that currently, considering that they’re all running around in a panic. By the looks of it, they found Roman. And another one of them has disappeared, so you know it can’t be good.

Everybody else is, by the looks of it, scrambling to gather supplies, presumably to escape back to Earth. On the center console is a video feed; a subtitle notes that the camera is right outside the door to the adjoining room. Roman and the missing one are standing facing the door. They are, to put it nicely, in a bad way.

Water gurgles and pours from them. Their eyes have gone colorless. The skin around their mouths is cracked and ruined. 

I get another image in my mind of Roman getting water for us. Some of it splashes on his skin. It’s tainted, I see. A broken filter. Pure, unfiltered glacier melt teeming with an organism that has its eyes on Earth.

It’s a bit funny, isn’t it? Humans from this century were so excited to find water on Mars. Evidently, the water was excited to find them, too.

Anyway, it’s a little insulting to my intelligence that the Doctor laid the key points to this exercise out in such a neat and organized manner, but I suppose he really needed me to know. Here’s the problem statement, he’s saying. 

  1. Don’t let the water get to Earth.
  2. Don’t let Adelaide live. 
  3. … save everybody else?



I find a moment of peace while everybody else is going mad, because the solution is quite simple. I wonder whether the Doctor knows it’s this easy for me.

I grab Adelaide’s arm as she sprints by me. “You can’t let the water get to Earth.”

“I know,” she says exasperatedly. We won’t. We’ll have to-” I wonder whether she was going to use the word “jettison”- “Roman and Yuri, but the rest of us are clean.”

“For now.”

She gives me a hard look. “There’s no possible way the water can get through. The door will hold. We’ll be fine, Doctor.”

Just as she says it - possibly because the Doctor has made it so - water begins to seep out the bottom of the door.

Adelaide curses. “Hurry up, everyone! One minute, then we have to leave! Do not touch the water!” 

She goes to continue getting ready to escape, but I hold her back once more. “Adelaide. I have a ship here. We might be able to reach it in time.”

“In time? What… why didn’t you say so?”

I fight the urge to smile. “Because I can’t save  _ everyone _ . Somebody has to stay behind. The base has to be destroyed.” Quietly, water begins to drip from the ceiling around the door. 

Her jaw sets. She isn’t the crying type. “The bomb. Action Five. It’s coded to my voiceprint alone.”

“You knew it would come to this.”

She nods.

I squeeze her arm, trying to comfort her, but I’m no good at that sort of thing. “I’ll get everybody home safe. You’re a hero, Adelaide.”

She nods again, then drops the supplies she was holding and goes to the console, typing in a command. “Everybody, wait.”

The humans stop moving, but the fear in their eyes only increases.

“The Doctor has volunteered his ship. Follow him. He’ll take you back to Earth.”

“What about you?” one of them asks, panicky.

She hits enter, and the screen begins to flash red. A countdown starts from two hundred. The water drips in time with the changing numbers. “We won’t all make it to the rocket. And I can’t risk any of you. We only have one option.” She’s resolute. There is no trace of fear or regret in her eyes. Sheets of water erupt from the cracks in the steel above us.

We don’t stay to see the rest of the countdown. Nobody needs to see Adelaide die. The rest of us have made it to the Tardis, crowded around the door, watching from afar as the base explodes. I shut the door and look at the rest of the humans. They all seem far too young. But they’re safe, and they’re going home. 

* * *

I feel a stroke of happy accomplishment when the simulation ends. I try not to show it. The Doctor wouldn’t think that this is something to be proud of.

“Was that sufficient?” I ask.

He simply hums, looking at the floor. What did he expect?

“Will you tell me what you did? Not so I can gloat,” I add hastily. “I just want to know. By the short version I got, I have a feeling you knew exactly what I was going to do.”

“You saw what you needed to see, and so did I,” he says quietly, a mystery undercurrent in his voice. “You did better, Missy. So you deserve to know why I took you there.” Pensively, he goes to sit on the cold metal stairs, and I follow, sitting close enough to hear his even, slow breathing.

“I went too far, Missy. I was such a… an overinflated idiot. I said it over and over to them. ‘I should leave’,” he repeats.

“Omniscience can have that effect,” I say, stumbling into words of comfort. “Did you tell them why?”

“Not at first. Not that they were about to die,” he answers, rubbing his hands together. “But there came a point where I couldn’t help myself. Adelaide needed to know…” he stops and revises himself. “ _ I _ needed to tell Adelaide of her legacy, and why it came about. I couldn’t leave out the last part. I was afraid, Missy, so afraid. I didn’t  _ know _ that Adelaide had to die to inspire her granddaughter. It was an assumption, but I told her anyway. I told her she needed to die.”

I feel… pity. “You and your fixed points in time.”

“Well, think of the alternative. What if I’d changed the trajectory of the human race; what if I’d debilitated their future? I couldn’t live with the responsibility of getting humans to the stars in a way that hadn’t already happened.”

“But you said I did it differently.”

“You did. You saved almost all of them, I could only save Mia and Yuri and Adelaide. But when I got them back to Earth, I was proud.”

“That’s my Doctor. Knowing you shouldn’t and doing it anyway.” My voice betrays me; my words were meant to be mockery. But they come out like a compliment.

He glances at me and smiles. “I called myself things I had only ever thought of in nightmares. You’re going to laugh.”

“Try me,” I say, fully intending to prove him right.

“”The Time Lord Victorious’.”

He pauses for the laugh track, but it doesn’t come, so he relaxes.

“I stood there in the snow and I was  _ right _ . I was right about everything. ‘Last of the time lords’ was the only identity I wanted to claim. I wanted to be the winner. The master of time.” The Doctor pauses, then smiles. “No offense.”

Now he has me chuckling. “It’s not the worst thing to be.”

“It was, though. I told Adelaide what her death would do. In doing that, I convinced her to kill herself just as well as you did. We got back to Earth. It’s always the guns, isn’t it?”

“Suicide or self-sacrifice. What’s the difference?” My voice is blanketed in sarcasm.

“I stopped counting how many times I caused the latter a long time ago. It was easy to live with it that way. In a terrible way, I had learned to rely on it,” he confesses. Perhaps this is his nightmare, the one where his deepest secrets are all finally uncovered, thawing in the harsh sunlight. “But the former…”

“So you wanted me to prove that, in causing noble self-sacrifice in others, you are doing the right thing. Convincing the soon-to-be departed that their deaths are more important than their lives. Do you not see the irony here?”

“I had warned you.”

“Sure. And I gave you what you asked for, didn’t I?”

“You  _ only  _ acted that way because of me?” he asks, unsettled.

“It might have gone a lot of ways,” I shrug. “The honest answer, Doctor, is that if I were actually in that position - totally alone, having no idea where you were, but with that foreknowledge of the significance of that Mars base that you so luckily had... if I was who I was when you were who you were. I would have saved all of the humans and not said a word of their future. I would have ushered the water to Earth. I would have waited, victorious, for you to come undo my creation.”

He is doubtful, shaking his head at me. “But that’s not you anymore. You wouldn’t...”

“Wouldn’t destroy your favorite planet just to get your attention?”

“Well…”

We share a shaky laugh. “You’re right, though, that’s a bit vanilla, isn’t it? I’m not that man anymore. I’m much more interesting now, as you very well know. Especially if this had been right after that last regeneration. Newborn Missy would have played with them. I would have told them everything. I would’ve been convincing. I would’ve sown discord. They would have fought over what to do. And then I would have left. And hung around to see whether Earth was destroyed or not.”

“But  _ that _ isn’t you either. Not anymore.”

It’s a chilling assumption, so I sharpen my words into icicles.

“Right now? Right this very moment. If I didn’t know it was a simulation and I didn’t know you were watching. I would leave. I would leave without saying a word. If I could, I would find you. And ask you what you would have done. Because, as you see, I can’t do anything ‘good’ without you. In fact, I am nothing at all without you. I don’t exist. I shouldn’t exist. I interrupt your neat little ‘last of the time lords’ mantle. So I would remove myself and ask for your benevolence. Because I can’t do anything good alone. And you don’t even want me to try.” I fold my arms, asking him to disagree. 

He’s frowning. “Don’t patronize me.”

His dismissal hurts more than concurrence ever could. “Oh, I’m lying again, is that it? You go on thinking that. I thought the whole point was that I was proving your low opinion of me wrong, but clearly you agree. You know what? I think you  _ want _ me to go on being bad.”

He scoffs, but doesn’t have a comeback. Even better for it, because maybe, this is  _ exactly  _ what I want. Or at least exactly what I want right now. Sweet validation.

I lean up against the stair railing, stretching out my legs. The pride I felt upon arrival is bleeding back into me. “I get it, Doctor. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve always been your outlet, haven’t I? You live vicariously through me. I get to do all those cruel nasty fun things you want to do but can’t, because they would violate your self-appointed title. It’s okay. I really don’t mind.”

The nerve I have struck doesn’t even try to strike back. 

“I have an idea,” I say, smiling, and he looks at me with hesitant excitement. “You have your simulation device. I’ve had a splendid time with it. Learned a lot, you know. I think you should have a turn.”

His jaw sets, but I see fire in his eyes again.   
  
“We could go together.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you like,” I say quietly, reaching out to take his arm, steering him like he always tries to steer me. “All of those times you wanted to do something bad but didn’t… when it crossed your mind that you were saving somebody who didn’t deserve to be saved… or wasn’t grateful for it, or thought they’d be better off without you... don’t you want to see what would happen if you didn’t have to be the Doctor?”

“What makes you think I don’t already know?”

I chuckle, running my thumb up and down his arm like I’m calming an animal. “Maybe you do. Even so, don’t you think I deserve to see? Isn’t it time for a little reciprocation?”

He looks to me, sort of dazed, and puts his hand atop mine in unspoken agreement. 

“Come on,” I lead him to the simulation generator. “First place that crosses your mind. Think of it as a vacation.”

“The first place…” his mouth twists, like he’s trying not to reveal a secret. He types into the generator’s interface, then reaches slowly for the lever that puts us there. His hand hovers over it.

I place mine over his, and together we enter the simulation once more.

We’re in a graveyard.  _ The _ graveyard.

There’s nobody else around this time, though. Except the Cybermen, obviously, but they’re standing idle. Our past selves aren’t here, nor is Clara, nor is Clara’s boyfriend. It’s just us and the army.

Victory, again.


	6. Chapter 6

Returning tangibly to your own memories is strange. I’ve thought of this place over and over; I’ve practiced. Anything I could have said or done differently has already come and gone from my mind. And because of that practice, I feel that I have gained some ground. This is a place of power, and now I can synthesize what I’ve imagined.

The Doctor grimaces at the stirred earth of the simulated graveyard, his palms facing towards me in surrender. “Is this what you wanted to see?”

It’s dim, dimmer than I remember. The Cybermen aren’t so shiny, just a dismal grey. Was it really this gloomy the first time? The clouds had looked so luminous to me, thick with pollen. Now it actually properly looks like London.

Though I suppose that’s what they say happens, right? The sober lights are never as bright. “You recall that I was, actually, here the first time. Therefore I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking at,” I provoke.

He’s standing as far as he can from the upturned graves, avoiding where death once slumbered. He wears an expression of defiance, and his voice is unguarded. “The circumstances under which I wouldn’t be the Doctor. The moment I came close. The moment  _ you _ helped to remind me what it means to be the Doctor,” he says.

“Yes,” I say condescendingly, “I  _ know _ that. We wouldn’t have been here in the first place if I didn’t know back then that  _ this _ was precisely  _ that _ . So, go ahead. Take the controller. You know you want to,” I wink, waving my wrist in the air.

He shakes his head. “Missy, there’s something missing. Something different.”

I look around. It’s still just us and the Cybermen. No whimpering humans in sight. “Yes. Clara’s not here,” I sigh.

“Clara,” he says in the manner of a eulogy. “I don’t remember what she said, or what she did. All I know is that I could never have accepted with her here.”

“You don’t remember her?” I ask, genuinely confused, because we’ve been in simulations together already. In retrospect, though, he was quite weird about it, and didn’t even give me time to talk about her afterward... “How did you simulate her, then? She was there in the submarine. She seemed like she always did.”

“I used your memories. Combined them with the gaps I know she once filled.” He chuckles sadly. “You know her better than I do, now.”

“Hm. I’d argue that I always did.”

“You have an unfair advantage. I can’t remember enough to dispute it.”

I chuckle to myself. “Oh, Doctor.” He’s refusing to look at me, so I walk a little closer, curling my hands over one of the granite gravestones, feeling the text beneath my fingers. “You’re the one missing the point. These Cybermen, here? The ones you didn’t want? They were simply part two of the gift.”

“What?” he asks shortly.

“Clara was part one, obviously.”

His gaze shoots up at me, but he quickly hides his surprise. “I know that,” he says too forcefully for it to be the truth. “And…”

“You’re welcome.”

He pauses, then relaxes, like he knew what Clara had always really been without knowing. It was never meant to be a secret. “You were always good at self-sabotage.”

I shrug.  _ He  _ thinks it’s self-sabotage, but that’s not a fight I want to have right now. Sure, Clara and the Doctor decided they had outgrown me and their  _ friendship _ (ick) had blossomed into something organic, beyond my influence. I still think they’re wrong, and Clara is still as good as dead. The prettiest flowers can be toxic, too. “I got what I wanted in the end, I suppose. But enough about me. Why are we  _ really  _ here, Doctor? We could’ve just as well had this conversation over dinner.”

He holds his hand out. “I want to see if accepting your army plays out how I’ve imagined it does.”

I give him a sharp look, then unclasp the bracelet, ignoring his palm in favor of placing it on him myself, just like the first time. I step back and he runs his hand over it.

“Give it a go, then.”

“Erm…” he mumbles into the controller. That’s not a word they’re programmed to understand. “Take a step backward.”

The whole army backpedals in sync. A deep crease forms between his eyebrows. He doesn’t give them a second command.

He’s  _ so _ boring sometimes. “Fun, isn’t it? Want to try another? Need some ideas? They know some common dance steps, if that’s your sort of thing. They give better hugs than you’d expect. Also, they’re good at blowing things up.”

“Yeah, I know.” His arm drops to his side; there’s a dark, misty look in his eyes.

“So. What’s the first order of business, Doctor? Ready to go save some souls? Feeling… good and noble?” I ask, trying not to sound too self-satisfied.

“No,” he replies quietly.

“That’s the spirit,” I say, smiling. “No need to be good. Overrated. None of this is  _ real _ , is it? Do whatever you like, and nobody will be the wiser. Except me, but, well, I guess you’ll just have to live with that. I’d be happy to turn a blind eye if you want to go take out this bad mood on some Daleks or something.”

The clouds in his eyes are dissolving; his usual sharpness is returning. He’s finally thinking. That’s good. “They won’t all fit in the Tardis. You don’t have ships for all of them. We’re limited to this time and place. Did you think about that?” he asks.

I chuckle. “I thought we’d work that out  _ together _ after you accepted. Details, you know? But we don’t need to worry about that anymore. We can just hop off to wherever and whenever you like, can’t we? You were happy to skip over the boring parts in  _ my _ last foray in dreamland.”

“ _ Together _ ,” he repeats, ignoring everything I said after that one word. “You weren’t going to disappear again? After we went through this the first time, I mean. You were going to come along with us?”

“‘Course I wasn’t going to disappear,” I say nonchalantly, but I’m a little hurt that he’d think such a thing. It tickles that I can still be surprised by his ignorance.

“Was it ever really about the army, Missy?”

I fold my arms. “Well, yes. Obviously. I went through quite enough to get it for you. But sure, I’ll admit it. It wouldn’t have been much fun to give you an army if I couldn’t be there to watch what you did with it.”

“Steer what I did with it, you mean,” he accuses, but there’s a notable lack of bite to his voice.

“No,” I argue just as gently. “What would be the fun… the point… in that?”

“You’re lying.”

I grimace. “I’m not. I wanted to come along for the ride, yes. And… actually spend time  _ with  _ you. Rather than time in opposition. It gets tiring, that does.”

“And that’s why you lied about Gallifrey being back?”

“Yep,” I say, popping the P. “That was a last-ditch attempt, though. I was really hoping you’d take the army and we’d storm across the stars. Sure, I’d egg you on. But I never intended to  _ make _ you do anything. Only show you what you were already capable of, as I very well told you when we were here the first time. And…” I clear my throat, but the words won’t come out.

There’s a pause. It has not been lost on either of us that I have just divulged that  _ years ago _ , eons in my own personal character development if we’re being honest, my exact intention was to do to the Doctor what he is now doing to me. The only difference was with my plan, reality was the operative concept. Reality would not be protected, but terrorized, shaped, perfected by us. And, courtesy of the simulations, he can be a coward and not give me the same opportunity.

But we don’t voice the reciprocation; we both already know anyway, and to put words would destroy the fragile feelings we’re sharing. We only stand, apart, staring at the ground, the Cyberman army watching and waiting, uncomfortable at the inaction, for their futile orders.

“I think we should go,” I say plainly.

He nods. “I wouldn’t have known where to go anyway. What to do with them. It’s not revenge if it’s not real.”

“It’s hard living without an enemy, isn’t it?” I smile at him, and he looks up in time to see it before it fades.

“I don’t want it to be,” he mutters, then negates the distance between us, putting his hands on my shoulders, taking me into a strange half-hug. His lips brush against my forehead.

When we vanish, we’re together.

Once we resurrect in the Tardis, we are apart.

My eyes narrow in suspicion, but I keep my tone light. “I just want to confirm… bear with me for needing to ask. But you were actually there, right? That wasn’t all in my mind? You were not… for lack of a better term… watching my daydreams?”

He laughs, grateful that I’ve returned to levity. Though it was a real question, and I certainly don’t feel very buoyant about it.

“Yes. It was a shared daydream, to use that terminology.” He sounds like he likes the change. It’s so much warmer than ‘simulation’.

“What’s my next one to be, then?”

“Ready so soon?” he asks quickly. 

I hum. “Might as well ride the momentum. I don’t like the taste of stillness right now.”

He raises his eyebrows. “It sounds like you have something in mind.”

“Oh, no,” I shake my head deliberately. “Maybe I’m just tired of you.”

He laughs. “It’s hard living without an enemy, isn’t it?” he mimics.

I look pointedly toward the Tardis door. “If you’d let me out, I’m sure I’d find a new one.”

A pause. A dark, heavy, brooding pause.

“Nah,” he finally says with forced nonchalance. “I’ve got a better idea. Time for you to see why it was Clara who kept me from accepting your army… and your company,” he finishes. 

I roll my eyes. “I  _ know _ Clara, silly. We spent a whole  _ day  _ together. On Skaro. Remember?”

“I remember how that day ended, Missy.”

“Oh, still going on about that?” I tease. “We were having fun right up until that point; it’s not my fault you were busy with daddy Dalek.”

“Missy,” he repeats.

“Right,” I sigh. “Alright, fine. Give me another day with her. It’s not going to do anything.”

He gives me that acute smile again, the one where all his shields are up. “You’re wrong.”

“Is that so?”

“You’re going to do me a kindness. You’re going to help me remember her. The submarine helped, but I think she deserves more.”

I laugh a humorless laugh. “You think  _ you _ deserve more. More of your memories back.”

“I’ll admit that. Seeing her face again…” He trails off; walks again to the simulation device, frowning. “No spoilers this time. You’re going in blind.”

“Punishing me, are we? You know I’m a glutton for that.” I give him my sauciest smile.

“I’m not indulging you with a response.”

“You just did, love.”

He sighs and turns the lever.

* * *

Clara is ahead of me already, pointing and commenting on various things in the space station, looking back at me each time to make sure I don’t disagree with her judgments. I guess my silence is taken for agreement. 

“Have you brought me to a space-restaurant?” she asks, though I can see in her face that it’s not really a question. That’s Clara though, none of her questions are ever really questions to her.

Especially because it’s obviously not a space-restaurant. One would hope not with the stench in here. “Well, remind me, Clara. Where did you want to go?”

“I just said somewhere fun.” She shrugs.

“And what’s your definition of fun?”

I look around the station with purpose. The overhead lights are either off or flickering. There’s some far-off creaking and sputtering noises, which is always a good sign in a space station. And… are those panicked whispers I hear down the west corridor?

Clara puts her hands on her hips, a mischievous look in her eye. “Who are we saving today?”

I nod towards the hallway and she takes this to be an answer, smiling and leading the way. That weird smell is growing more pungent. Simultaneously murky and acrid. Most people wouldn’t know this, but I remember it fondly as the smell of decomposing human skin.

But there are no bodies to be seen, dead or alive, no alarms going off, and no windows to give me an idea of what we’re orbiting. “Bit creepy, isn’t it?” I say.

“Since when do you think anything is creepy?”

“I don’t. I just wanted to see if you did.”

“Well  _ I _ don’t either,” she lies, walking more quickly since I said something.

She turns us down one of the brighter corridors where the smell is less pervasive, then stops when we hear muffled footsteps. There’s heaps of broken scientific equipment lining this hallway and the walls are smeared with dark grease. Before we can think to retrace our steps, four soldiers round the corner cautiously. Only two of them relax when they see we aren’t big hairy monsters. And one of the two that doesn’t is a grunt, and they aren’t really programmed to relax ever anyway.

The one holding the biggest gun stands ahead of the others. She brandishes it at us, eyes narrowed. Clara and I put our hands up before she even has to order us to.

“Identify yourselves,” she commands.

I look to Clara and she looks to me.

“We’re... backup,” Clara says.

“We didn’t call for backup,” rebuts the officer, hands tightening on the gun.

I raise my eyebrows. “Too bad. Because your commander did.”

Her expression hardens further, but in frustration rather than suspicion. Hey, who likes being told they need help?

One of the soldiers behind her touches her shoulder and offers a placating look. “This is good, Nagata. We need it.”

Begrudgingly, Nagata stands down. “Don’t tell me what we need, Chopra,” she jabs, then sighs. “Yeah. Okay. But I’m still in charge here.”

“Fine by us,” Clara says brightly. “Could you give us a quick briefing? What’s happened in the last, oh… hour or so?”

Nagata sighs. “We still haven’t found anyone yet. No survivors, but no casualties either. And we know there are still people aboard. The escape pods are all here.”

The oldest looking soldier smiles, unconcerned. “It’s not like it’s a large ship. Makes you think they’re hiding from us.”

“Don’t look so happy about it, Deep-Ando,” says Chopra. “Sorry about him. He’s a little overly nonchalant. Hiding or no hiding, it’s creepy, and I’m not afraid to admit it. Speaking of which,” he peers at us.

“Clara and the Doctor,” I offer.

“Looks like neither of you bothered to bring torches, so you’re lucky we have extra.” He hands them to us.

Unperturbed, Clara begins to shine her torch around and poke at the rubble lining the corridor, then traces her finger over the grimy wall, investigating. “Well, with more of us, it’ll be more difficult for anybody to hide. Maybe we can figure out what they’re all so afraid of. Shall we split up?”

God, she’s bossy.

“We’re not splitting up,” says Nagata. “We’re already down two and I’m not losing anybody else. But if you know where you’re going,” she gives Clara a look of faux-respect, “lead on.”

Clara loves pretending to know what she’s doing, so she’s in her element being the mother goose. She tries the first door we pass, but it’s locked. “Doctor, would you get that open?” she orders.

“Your wish is my command,” I answer, letting the sarcasm come through. Is unlocking doors the only thing I’m good for? I sonic the door open, and we all shuffle inside. The room is large and similarly dark as the corridors are, and it looks to be a sort of lab. In the center are four large pods, much larger than coffins, but roughly the same shape, and potentially function.

Chopra rolls his eyes. “There you go. Bet you they’re all in there.”

“This one says ‘empty’.” Deep-Ando motions to the closest pod. “You’re just prejudiced.”

“Yeah. I am prejudiced. You’re all happy to sell away your sleep, and I’m happy to judge you for it.”

“‘Sell away your sleep’?” Clara asks.

“Not literally,” says Nagata. “Chopra likes to exaggerate. He’s just lazy and wants us to feel bad for actually wanting to  _ do _ something with our extra eight hours a day.”

“He’s never used Morpheus, can you believe that?” Deep-Ando says.

Clara smiles at Chopra and points to herself and I. “Neither have we.”

Oh, look, she’s made a friend! To avoid having to gossip about our sleeping habits, I interrupt. “Are we not on a rescue mission here?”

Everybody except Nagata, who was already snooping around, makes noises of assent and starts to actually do their jobs, wandering around the lab. I’d heard of Morpheus before, but only as history, and had certainly never thought to hop over to the 38th century to give it a go. A way for humans to delete one of the few things that’s unassailably theirs specifically so they could generate more capital for the ruling class? It never exactly sounded like a fun getaway to me, nor even something I would ever want to steal or copy. Still, I approach the pod curiously. When in Rome, eh?

Naturally, because the creepy vibes have to come to a head somewhere, as soon as I touch its cheap plastic exterior, I’m pulled inside by weblike metal cables.

And it’s just timeless blackness. And then it’s over. When the pod door opens, Clara stares down at me, worried. “What happened?” she demands.

“I didn’t hop in, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I climb out, feeling… nothing, really. I guess, since these were designed for humans only, it’s like a placebo for Time Lords. Chopra looks smug. “They can tell when you need rest. The ones back home just beep annoyingly until you get in, but I guess the new versions won’t even give you a choice.”

“That’s psychotic,” says Clara.

“Nagata,” says the grunt, pointing at the last Morpheus pod at the end of the row. “Not empty.”

We all stop what we’re doing and gather around it. “Hold on,” says Nagata. “Where’s Deep-Ando?”

“He must’ve gone looking somewhere else. I’m sure he’s fine,” Chopra reassures her.

“We’re going to find him as soon as we figure out who is in this pod.”

Chopra nods, and sure enough, their assumption that all the pods were as empty as the first led them to miss the only potential sign of life we’ve seen so far here. The cowards all simply look at it, waiting for Nagata to tell them what to do, but I feel that my skill set has not been utilized so far, so I tell them to step back. There’s a little gap at the top window where the face goes, so I stick my fingers inside it and pull down as hard as I can.

It begins to budge, and I see a flash of someone inside, but once they see me, it starts to slam shut again, and I pull my fingers out of the way just in time. Sure, I’d get them back when this is all over, but I don’t want to get virtual blood everywhere.

“Doctor,” Clara says condescendingly. “Nobody is going to want to come out if they think they’re being attacked.”

“Sorry, Clara,” I respond. “How would you get them out?”

She shoos me aside, then starts sweet-talking the window; the juxtaposition between Clara’s kind words and the soldiers all pointing their guns at the pod is priceless. I’m rolling my eyes so hard I can barely make out what she’s saying. But I can’t claim that it doesn’t work, because rather than the window shade sliding back down, the whole pod door hisses open.

Out steps a small human man sporting fashionably ugly glasses, the eyes underneath their heavy frames darting around, trying to confirm that the safety Clara promised him is true. “Erm… hello,” he says lamely.

“Who are you?” I ask but Nagata talks over me, hurrying to lower her gun.

“Wait… aren’t you…”

“Er, yes,” he says with a timid smile, like he’s glad to be recognized and doesn’t want to show it. “Gagen Rassmusen. Inventor of Morpheus. At your service.”

Clara cocks her head to the side. “This is  _ your _ lab? What are you hiding from? Where is everybody else?”

He hesitates, and the overhead lights flicker all the way off; the clear frames of his glasses glow eerily under our torchlight. “Well. I presume they’re dead. In a sense.”

“What do you mean ‘in a sense’?”

Before he can reply, the answer comes in the form of a distinct growling from the door we entered from. We shine our torches over in unison and what the beams illuminate has got to be the  _ ugliest  _ monster I have ever seen. That delectable smell of decomposing skin all makes sense now. There’s two of the poor sods, definitely human-height, made of sedimented pus-yellow particles globbing towards us on weeping legs.

“Run!” Nagata shouts.

Chopra and Clara ask where simultaneously. There’s a curiously guilty expression on Rassmusen’s face. “Down here. Follow me - there’s another door.”

Nagata turns around and shoots at the creatures as the rest of us follow Rassmusen. From the squelching sounds, aggressive growling, and whimpers of frustration, the bullets must be no more than an annoyance to these conscious conglomerates of gunk. I run with everybody else, but my eyes aren’t on where we’re going. Even as she flees, Clara looks so unafraid. She thinks herself invincible now. Funny. She wasn’t always like that.

Rassmusen unlocks a door hidden behind a large stainless-steel cabinet with a thumbprint and we all dart through, then he closes it back up in a huff. This new room is smaller and only has the one entrance we came in through, but the lights are working in here; it seems to be used only for storage by the look of the shelves laden with more white plastic and spools of copper wire. 

Everyone else is panting, either from the fear or the flight, but I feel rather alive. I turn to Rassmusen, fully intending the note of accusation in my voice. “What the hell are those?”

“Erm. Well. They’re…” his eyes dart between each of us, then settle on the floor, “well, they’re what’s left of the crew.”

Nagata catches her breath first. “So, they’re all… you’re the only one left?”

“I think so.”

She sighs. “Great. So much for the rescue mission.”

Rassmusen finally drops the sheepish expression. “I’d very much like to be rescued,  _ actually _ .”

“Hold on,” I say, putting up a hand. “You’re asking for help and you’re not even going to explain how your crew managed to transform into great sandy monsters?”

“Yeah,” Clara agrees, backing me. “You definitely owe us an explanation.”

He pauses, but I get the vague impression that it’s more for dramatic effect than out of mourning. He pops his knuckles. “As I said, Morpheus is my creation. I take full responsibility for it. And it is safe. Totally safe. I mean, obviously you’ve all used it; you know this. But this was a research station. Meaning I was trying to improve it. So many wonderful things I was working on. A hundred orbits of Neptune without sleep - enhanced by new and improved mood and productivity boosters that would last the entire five-hundred-eighty-seven days. Think of all the added productivity. Once more, I would revolutionize the economy. You have to believe me, it was such a… noble endeavor, it just…”

“Noble, my arse,” Clara says. “It’s disgusting.”

“He was only trying to help,” Nagata says defensively.

“And look what he did!” Chopra spits. “He’s a murderer.”

Clara nods. There’s a fire in her eyes. Until now, I’d only ever seen a single match’s worth of flame before. This time, it’s at least big enough to have a weenie roast on. “Chopra’s right. But…”

“We were commissioned to rescue everybody aboard,” Nagata reminds us.

“He  _ murdered  _ everybody aboard,” I state. “So that’d be pretty hard to do. Job’s obsolete.”

Rassmusen responds only by clenching his jaw. The storage room feels as if it’s shrinking as the silence balloons.

Finally, Clara breaks it. “What do we do, Doctor?”

Nagata begins to argue, surely over why I’m suddenly the one in charge, but Clara actually shushes her.

I stare at Rassmusen, and anger rises in my throat at the sight of his sweaty, stubbled face. I think of what he really is. What he really thinks his race ought to be, and the facet of life evolution didn’t do well enough for him. A robber, plain and simple, of the one place we can all go to escape from the oppression of our waking days. The only place we can be truly alone, perfectly unproductive, at least until inspiration sparks in our dreams and we wake, excited, and if we’re lucky, we even find the energy to do what our subconscious is urging us to.

But perhaps what I am most angry about is not the peace or the creativity at all. It’s the stolen nightmares. Those sublime reminders that horror lives inside all of us. The knowledge that it is not only me who carries violence around everywhere, even if for most people it’s more parasite than symbiote.

I shake my head. “He made his bed, who are we to not let him sleep in it? We’re leaving him.”

“No,” he coughs, dread in his eyes. “You can’t. Please. Have mercy.”

“Never,” I say with cold finality.

I feel Clara stiffen next to me.

“So that’s it then? We’re just leaving?” asks Chopra, who is poorly concealing being glad about it.

“We can’t. The sandmen are still outside. And our bullets don’t do anything to them.” Nagata is trying to sound practical, but I think she simply can’t bear the idea of leaving Rassmusen.

“Here’s an idea,” I begin, grinning at the doomed inventor. “How would you like to be bait?”

“Doctor,” warns Clara.

“It’s a good plan, dear. He lures them away, and we have a much better shot at making it back to the Tardis alive.”

I know everybody is going to argue, and I’m really not in the mood, so I open the door back into the lab, shove Rassmusen out of it bodily, whisper a sly  _ “better run” _ and slam the door behind him.

It does, in fact, dawn on me that I am doing a pitiful job of acting like the Doctor. I’m not stupid. I’m  _ angry.  _ I have every right to be. Rassmusen annoyed me, and also contributed to the downfall of the 38th century Triton human colony, and at least one of those two things is worth a potential death sentence.  _ Potential _ . See? I’m a  _ total _ softie.

Nobody else seems to think so, the ungrateful wretches. “What?” I ask.

For once, even Clara doesn’t say anything. Nobody does. A few minutes pass.

“I think that’s been enough time,” I say. “After me?” I crack open the door, peeking out with the torch to make sure Rassmusen isn’t about to sic one of his victims on us, but the coast is clear. “Come on. Our ship isn’t far. We’ll just drop you back on Triton, you say there were no survivors, and just for good measure, I think we ought to blow up the ship. Don’t want those ugly bastards getting anywhere else. Maybe we can even drum up a public awareness campaign against Morpheus, have the whole thing brought down, make sure nobody else is in danger of getting grossified. So, I suppose it’s in a roundabout way, but this actually is shaping up to be a pretty successful rescue mis-”

Out of nowhere, we all stumble to the ground, and instruments start to fly off tables. I feel a hundred pounds heavier, and struggle to get back up, fighting the weight Neptune is graciously giving me now that the grav-shields are giving up.

Clara ducks to avoid a flying microscope, which hits the grunt squarely in the head. “Oh, great, this is exactly what we needed!” she shouts over the cacophony of crashing metal.

I grab the nearest countertop to hoist myself up, grateful that the Doctor hadn’t chosen to become a bodybuilder in this regeneration. Maybe Rassmusen or the sandmen have gotten to the gravity controller, but I know the ship is small from the layout of the corridors we’ve been through, so a control room where I can try and fix this, if that’s even possible, can’t be far. 

That’s right, fix it. Not grab Clara and flee to the Tardis and leave the station to discorporate. Because, by the look of it, Nagata has been thumped too; she lays slumped, unmoving, her gun and a trickle of blood sliding down the floor which has warped and sloped. Without the anti-grav restored, I don’t think any of us are up to dragging her and the grunt to safety.

“Come on, Clara,” I say, pointing a thumb towards the door. Chopra looks unharmed but more concerned with making sure Nagata is alive than spending any more time with me, so we leave him without a word.

Luckily, we aren’t so close to Neptune as to be relegated to crawling, and once I have my sea legs it’s not so bad. “Do you know where you’re going?” asks Clara.

“No, but I’m sure we’ll find it soon!” AKA  _ I’m sure the Doctor will soon show me the way. _ Outside the lab, the bolts holding together the wall panels creak threateningly, and the junk that had been strewn about has arranged itself, breadcrumb-like, down the slope of the floor. I take a chance and follow it, trying not to lose my balance and hoping that Clara doesn’t slip and crash into me.

We pass a few doors, but inside they’re all just abandoned living quarters, so we trod on ahead. I can feel Clara’s frustration glowing hot, but at least we aren’t being attacked.

Speaking of which. “There you are,” I say as we reach the end of this corridor, where the rubble has piled up against the corner. Clara breathes a sigh. One of the sandmen is pinned against the wall, and whatever is holding its body together isn’t quite strong enough to fight the gravity. The grains slough off it like an hourglass.

“Hope that’s happening to all of them,” Clara says.

“Maybe it’s a good thing that I couldn’t fix the anti-grav right away. Besides the weighty feeling, of course.”

“I’m kind of getting used to it,” Clara says, picking up her feet.

I nod. “Better than that coppery-smelling ‘round the edges, artificial gravity, eh? Can’t manufacture the real thing, man.”

I turn to round the corner, but Clara takes my arm, looking me directly in the eyes. “There you go again. You’re not-” her grip tightens- “You’re different. First, you’re… basically  _ executing _ someone, acting as though mercy disgusts you, and now you’re quoting  _ her _ . When you couldn’t have even heard her say that in the first place.”

“Her?” I ask, feigning ignorance, though I can’t help but press my lips together to contain my guilty smile.

Clara lets go and folds her arms across her chest. “What have you done with the Doctor?”

A laugh escapes my mouth. “I  _ am _ the Doctor, silly!”

Clara rolls her eyes, but I see her trying not to smile. She  _ knows  _ me, or at least enough of me, because I have let her. And she believes with utmost certainty that I couldn’t possibly defeat the Doctor, and if I had, she would most definitely not be alive right now.

“Fine. Fine,” I say, holding up my hands in surrender. “He’s back in the Tardis. Safe and sound.”

“Since when? How long have you been Missy? What is that, a perception filter?”

“Just since we got on the ship.”

“Why, though? And what’s  _ he _ doing, why is he okay with this? Don’t tell me you’re doing it without his permission.”

“Of  _ course  _ not! No, Clara, I’m making it up to him.”

She doesn’t look nearly as suspicious as she probably ought to. “So he’s... watching us?”

“Yeah, you could say that. It’s a bit confusing. Oh, Clara,” I adopt a loving tone, “you aren’t mad, are you? I just had  _ so _ much fun the last time we hung out, and I know we didn’t end on the best note-”

“You tried to make my best friend kill me-”

Clara stops arguing and her eyes go wide, focusing on something behind me, then she grabs my arm again and pulls me into the fastest run we can manage under the circumstances. How precious! She could have fed me to the sandmen, but no, here she is choosing forgiveness, not vengeance. I always knew I chose my inferiors well.

But she isn’t leading me to any possible control room. In fact, I even think we pass it, by the look of all the flashing warning lights beyond a dented and dinged door. 

Clara knows exactly where she is going. She’s leading me back to the Tardis.

I grin to myself when it comes into sight. “You know, Clara, despite all your efforts, there’s one thing that will always stop you from  _ truly  _ being like the Doctor.”

“Oh, yeah?” she challenges, whipping back around to look at me.

“You’ll never have faith in me.”

She stomps away towards the Tardis. “I can live with that.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Where is he?” Clara demands, her voice booming through the empty Tardis.

Her normally angelic face has turned positively hellish. Angry Clara was always my favorite Clara.

But I’m just as confused as she is. I thought that would’ve been it. Simulation over, spaceship gone, safe and sound in the Tardis for real. But the simulation device is nowhere to be seen.

What more does the Doctor want from me?

I quickly come up with a half-truth, but I realize as I’m saying it that it’s a lot more than half. “He must not be done with us. I mean, me. There’s, um… something he must be waiting for us to do.”

“Like  _ what _ ?” She points to the door, then starts pacing. “Go back out there and blow up the ship? Because I am  _ not _ doing that. Not when you’ve probably been manipulating and perverting everything since we stepped foot on board.”

I raise my eyebrows, flattered. “I was under the impression that you always thought  _ you _ were in control.”

She shakes her head and looks around, avoiding me. “Doctor,  _ please _ come out. Wherever you are.”

“He’s not coming, dear. It’s just you and me.”

“Then tell me this. Was that distress signal even real? Was that ship real?  _ Did you kidnap me? _ ”

“Oh, please. The Doctor wouldn’t let that happen. As for the ship being real… who’s to say?” I shrug.

She exhales, but it’s more like a bull snorting than a sigh. “You’re horrible.”

“And proud of it,” I respond automatically. But when the words actually hit me, I pause. I remember what he implied before this simulation started. This isn’t for me. It’s for the Doctor, and I’m supposed to be doing him a kindness.

Even if Clara couldn’t fully be Clara without the Doctor, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to  _ find _ her for him. 

But that doesn’t feel right. Clara died, or disappeared at least, before she got the chance to see me again. Before she got the opportunity for closure with the person who finely tuned her own life for dastardly ends. Clara deserved more than the Doctor gave her.

It follows, then, that as excruciating as it may be, I must be kind to Clara. I have to give her what the Doctor cannot. Clara, who I hand picked like an apple from a tree, knowing that behind the cold healthy flesh was a dazzling rainbow of rot. Who I gave to the one person who would show rot compassion. 

I move to the other side of the Tardis, as far away from Clara as I can, in case I end up  _ actually _ feeling something. I try to make my voice the same as it is when I speak with the Doctor - vulnerable, quiet, an admission of the hated fact that my defenses aren’t what they used to be. It’s not that hard when my nameless emotion is lurking, ready to strike. “I think you’ve forgotten, Clara. You may hate me. You’ve got every right to. But I  _ made _ you. Just remember that I’m the only reason you had any real time with the Doctor.”

She stops pacing and gives me a sharp look. “I know that,” she says, annoyed. “But you’re wrong, Missy. You may have kept us together when time and space were trying to keep us apart. But friendship? That was all us.”

I smile, just a little, because I know I’m a hypocrite, and I know she’ll tell me that. “Aren’t friends supposed to be good for each other?”

“You said  _ you _ were friends with him. Do you think  _ you’re _ good for him?”

I lean my head back and laugh a throaty laugh. “Of course I do. And you of all people should understand why.”

“Because I’m good for him?”

“Because you  _ think _ you are, too.”

Clara crosses her arms; I think she’s forgotten that the Doctor is supposed to be watching us. “And what’s that supposed to mean? That you wanted me to be like your… your surrogate, or something?”

“What’s the difference between you and I, Clara?”

“You’re evil,” she says without hesitation. 

“For rhetorical purposes, I’ll allow that. You’re good, I’m evil. But we’re both convinced we’re exactly like the Doctor. What does that tell us?”

“That one of us is wrong.”

“No,” I drawl.

Clara scoffs. “Well, we’re not both right.”

“I think we are,” I say plainly.

“Well you’re wrong!” she practically shouts, her anger returning. “You want me to stop being reductive? You’re a manipulative, self-projecting, controlling, power-tripping…”

She runs out of steam; she’s figured it out, finally. Maybe the real similarity between Clara, the Doctor, and I is that we’re all idiots. The thought makes me laugh, and somehow, I genuinely feel that kindness I’m supposed to be showing.

“Clara,” I say gently, “if you could go back. Be free of my influence. Die the first time, once and for all, like the rest of your kind. Never be the girl who always saves the Doctor. Would you choose that? What would the Doctor be without you?”

She takes a long time to answer, but I’m glad she finally does. “He’d be dead.”

So what would the Doctor be without  _ me _ ? He wouldn’t be dead.  _ I _ know he wouldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be.

He wouldn’t have ever let that happen. He’s always known how much it means to me that he can’t fall by anyone else’s hand.

Sure, I made Clara the perfect person to ensure his constant survival. But Clara was never only that. As she saved him, she poisoned him with her so-called “friendship”. Is that transitive, too? Does that mean the toxicity I created for them is what’s coming for me? That once we’re actually together, we can never really last, because I’m too good at being bad for him?

Clara looks up at me, and she’s fighting back tears. “I’m never going to thank you. You don’t get to take credit for all my choices after you put us together. But no. I wouldn’t go back.”

I wonder if, someday, I’ll ever be ready to tell him how many times I’ve saved him. All I can hope is that he’s already figured it out.

* * *

That must’ve been enough for the Doctor. The change of scenery wasn’t drastic, nor is the mood. Just that damned black box metastasizing by the console, and Clara’s noticeable absence.

His eyes are a little red. They’re always a little red, but the color seems more pronounced now, or else I’m just closer - finding myself leaning against the console while he pretends to play with buttons and switches - than he normally lets me get.

I watch how his hands shake, and feel a sudden stab of sorrow, an IV of sympathy trickling into me. The sonic landscape of the Tardis is too serene for me to break with my coarse timbre. 

I wonder what I would be if I’d lost my memories of him. If I could retain nothing else but what we did, what  _ I _ did, and how we were never in balance, how the shadow-puppets never matched up with the shapes my hands made. How I always tipped the scale in favor of violence, in favor of misery. With him removed from the memories, it would all seem so needless.

I look into the light, unblinking, unafraid, and pull him into a hug.

He buries his face in my neck, pressing his skin into mine, like he wants me to feel his expression without seeing it, like he needs to shade that light. And I do the same, because I’m weak from the weight of all the truths I’ve told, all the secrets I’m forgiving myself for, and the warmth of his hands on my back. I don’t want to keep wearing the wounds. I don’t want to keep picking at the scabs and calling what’s underneath  _ Missy _ . 

I don’t want to keep being defined by pain.

He pulls away, and I see the sheen of tears on his skin. And then he leaves me. 

* * *

He used but a few words. “I’m going to go.”

That was all he ever needed to say, and I simply gave him a smile in return, because he was probably choosing what was best for him. I’m trying not to assume that he knew that what was best for him conflicted with what was best for me.

I didn’t choose to let him go because I want to stop being a hypocrite, or anything similarly impossible. It wasn’t to prove the point that I can be alone. I just wanted to see what kindness spawns, and to learn whether I’m strong enough to see it through.

I mean, he’s the Doctor. He needs his problems to solve, and I guess I’m not as tough of a nut to crack as I used to be. Most people like it when their problems sort themselves out on their own. But I wouldn’t be thinking about him, or talking about him, or feeling about him the way I do if he was  _ most people _ .

Anyway, I know I’m a bit overwhelming to be around all the time. It’s not even selflessness for me to admit he needed Bill, since now he knows that she’s one of the only two people (relatively) free from my influence that he’s been close to in ages. 

So, what does letting someone go mean when you’re stuck inside a ship together?

I go and find my own vault. I find the farthest reaches of the Tardis and a room I can call my own and a place where I cannot be found. Where I can best forget that we’re in a moving vehicle at all.

I find the most terrestrial thing I can. A cave.

Or, naturally, the pretense of one. It’s warm and humid and the floodlights illuminating crystals of interest are on a clapper, which is fun. I clap them on and see that the cave is currently under the guise of a geology lab, so I clear out all the microscopes and grain size charts so I don’t have to think about anybody else ever being in here. (I do keep the little bottles of acid.) Among the dripping stone and between the hot celadon pools, somebody had dragged in an oversized wingback armchair, presumably for sitting on one’s arse while watching somebody else do work. 

Dropping heavily into it, I run my hands over the velvet, which hasn’t rotted despite being in here for potentially centuries. I lean my head back and stare into the stalactite ceiling. The water droplets hanging precariously off their tips are lit up like stars.

I bite my tongue and clap the lights off. One of those droplets hits my face.

I laugh to myself and let it trickle down my cheek like a teardrop, feeling suddenly tired, like the water is actually venom, and the cave is putting me to sleep so it can devour me whole. Or maybe a better term is hypnosis, forced recall. I shut my eyes, curling up in the chair in submission, already feeling the dangerous tug of memory. This is what I deserve.

* * *

_ Your veins are glued to the floor. _

_ Not literally, you soon realize. You grasp around at your arms and find that the blood vessels are still inside of your body. You begin to adjust to your new eyeballs, and the first thing they see is the cobwebs on the backs of your hands beginning to fade. Rubbish, you think, this veil of skin.  _

_ Inside, you still feel sluggish. Viscous. Each one of your blood cells is a cold, black neutron star. You reach up to your face and before you even notice the warping of bones, you feel a smear of slick salt. Preposterous, you think, this gift of despair. _

_ Your last rebirth wasn’t like this. It was welcomed, that one. You’d begged for it. And when it came, you felt only pride. Elation. Comfort, even. The embrace of a cold pool on a hot summer’s day. But summer has passed, and now you’re frozen. Mania is easy to love while it lasts, but you fear it died with you. Shameful, you think, this divorce of identity. _

_ In a way, you miss the sound of drums. You’re the Master, for goodness’ sake. Shame isn’t in your vocabulary. It’s unacceptable. You were happy just the way you were. You need to get that back. You deserve it. _

_ You sit up, which is easier than you thought it would be. Then you stand, which is even easier than that. Then you shake the flies from your head, you laugh, you test out all your limbs and find them to your liking. It seems that you’re female. You are going to take all of those impossibly small, impossibly dense cells dredging through your hearts and you are going to crush them even further. You will not stop until you are made of little black holes. You will devour. _

_ According to your Tardis, you’re in an especially deserted area of deep space, as if you had the sense to take yourself somewhere safe to die. That’s strange. Almost reeks of fear. What did you fear? Why did you fear? _

_ Should you still fear? Everything is becoming so complicated so quickly in this body. Now you have to actually decide, on your own, what your first action will be. Those black holes won’t absorb themselves. So will you start by feeding on bite-sized tidbits of despair and work your way up, or cook yourself a meal worthy of Christmas dinner? _

_ Neither really feels right. Or maybe it’s the despair part that doesn’t feel right. Is that  _ really _ what you exist for? To cause despair?  _

_ Isn’t that a little old-fashioned?  _

_ Another idea pops into your head. Actually, a bunch of them at once. So many that you have a difficult time sorting them out. And you find that you don’t want to sort them out. They’re friends, they are. Dancing with each other, twirling so fast that you can’t see their faces. Chaotic little beauties. You want to be like them. Maybe they’re the chopped-up bits of your beloved mania, moving too quickly for you to grasp them. _

_ Sure, that sounds good. You’ll just go cause some chaos. If it leads to despair, that’s great. If by some horrific turn of events it causes ambivalence, or even… joy, ugh!… well, then it wasn’t really your fault, now was it? _

_ In no time, you’re lighting forest fires, you’re poking holes in dams, you’re poisoning morning cups of coffee. You’re puncturing fuel tanks, you’re tripping pedestrians crossing the street, you’re launching flat-Earthers into orbit. You’re kidnapping kings. Burning insects with your magnifying glass. _

_ None of these acts, not one, nor in aggregate, fills you up. Cruelty is so ephemeral these days; you move on because your ears tire of the sound of screaming. You don’t like being reminded that you can scream, too. So you try it the other way around. Take up ruling, like you’ve always wanted to; for some reason, it’s easier than it used to be. You barely had to try and now you’re the queen. You’re the empress. You’re the goddess. All the statues are nice, sure, and the prayers are so sweet and precious, and it’s just downright adorable when people die in your honor for absolutely no good reason. You’re almost disappointed when nobody tries to stop you.  _

_ Look at you. You used to be so obsessed with leading planets, and now it just bores you. You’re really not a great leader; you’re too good at it. Where did this apathy come from? _

_ You try manufacturing your own resistance. Bloodthirst never lasts. Destroying planets, making them crash and erupt and drown in the most beautiful and spectacular of ways, gets old. Eventually, it doesn’t feel real anymore. Terror loses its shine. Each of these hits feeds your hungering blood less and less.  _

_ You can feel, deep down, that what you really hunger for isn’t the random pain of strangers. It’s not even the pain of worlds. And when you tried going bigger, you went too big. You toyed with black holes and dark matter, but they scared you because they were bigger than you. You fled before you could see the result.  _

_ You walked away, shrugging. The chaos in your mind is growing into a quieter sort. The drone of a million ideas that have come and gone.  _

_ What are you the master of, anyway? _

_ You’re not the master of these little planets you’ve been playing with, that’s for certain. You don’t want to be the master of the universe. You’re  _ certainly _ not the master of yourself. The tension between your apathetic mind and your black hole hearts proves that.  _

_ What do  _ they _ want? What have you spent all this time ignoring? _

_ You know the answer to that. You don’t have plausible deniability there.  _

_ If you’ve been sliding by, unnoticed, or worse, ignored, as you’ve set planets alight and established yourself ruler and collided asteroids and possibly caused the K-T extinction… what would you have to do for a little attention? _

_ You sigh, and try atonement. _

_ You settle on just one good deed. Any more and you couldn’t live with yourself. But, for good measure, you pick a big one.  _

_ It was such a small motion. You had tipped the first domino. The binary planets were balanced in orbit well enough to where they’d never collide. Well, at least in a physical sense. The inhabitants of each were ever at war with one another. All you had done was pushed one of them just hard enough to send it careening into the other.  _

_ The timing was perfect. Not enough time for either planet to figure out a way to stop their collision course, but long enough for them to feel the cold embrace of doom. The solution is simple.  _

_ You put the kettle on and fix the orbit, pushing the planet aside like a child playing with marbles. You send transmissions from either planet telling each that the other one saved them. A couple of pressed buttons and you’ve saved eleven billion people. You created peace before the water boiled. _

_ You wait around for a few days, gloating to nobody in particular at first, then, slowly, your voice fades, and you can’t even muster the will to talk to yourself. Because you’re alone. There’s no one to tell, no one to be proud of you. No unread messages, no missed calls. No drumbeat.  _

_ Shame you’d never made any friends. Shame you’d never even tried. Why would you try? You  _ had _ a friend.  _

_ You’re going to have to be more direct. You should know that by now. None of this petty nonsense. You miss him too much. What did pride ever do for you, anyway? _

* * *

There should’ve been a warning sign on the door to that bloody cave:  _ DANGER, MAY CAUSE UNCONTROLLABLE FLASHBACKS. _

As if I needed a reminder of how I was when I was still trying to call myself the Master. The emptiness; the loneliness. I embodied  _ without hope, without witness, without reward _ . It was hell then. It’s still hell now.

I know that I can’t be alone. It’s all aimlessness and apathy there. The boredom of freedom was worse than the boredom of the vault. At least in the vault, there was something to make me  _ feel _ . 

And worse than the monotony of generic badness to generic planets was the disproven theory. The broken pattern. The doubt: was it restraint that kept me from going further, fiercer, attacking everything I saw, making a new name for myself, rediscovering my beloved infamy? Or was it a sign that I was no longer capable of that?

There’s some things that I can’t believe regeneration will ever take away from me. I’ll always be fearsome and wry. Venomous and insidious. Sinister and selfish.

But not villainous. Not anymore. Too much baggage.

Whatever I am, whatever I’ll be, I’ll take in stride, so long as I don’t have to be alone for it. Am I to earn the right to friendship? Or is my happiness more guaranteed as a work-in-progress, a project, just another problem to be solved? Is my resistance valued more than my learning? 

Do I have to choose? I can’t commit to any of that. Even after all these years, I surprise myself each day with what I’m capable of, and I can’t - no, I don’t even want to - predict where I’ll be tomorrow. The Doctor will never grow bored of me that way.

I can’t be boring. I can be bored, but I can’t be boring. 

I open my eyes to the darkness, and it feels not eerie but inviting, like a blackboard waiting for me to fill it with my ideas. The droplets of water hitting the pools have sunk into a lazy metronome pattern, and I know that if I sit here any longer they’ll hypnotize me once more. So I clap the lights on, leave the infernal place behind, and wander again. 

I’ll see how many books I can read before the Doctor does me the favor of returning to our coalescence. The stories, the very idea of stories, have grown stale to me. But they’ll pass the time.

* * *

Six books later, he knocks.

I’m in the library again, watching the fog wax and wane over the illusive mountains out the hologram windows. But when he knocks, I might as well be back in the vault.

This has been my home since leaving the cave, and I had been wondering how long of a break he needed after the Clara Thing. It wasn’t six months, but it  _ was _ a little too long for me. I shiver and go to get the door, ordering myself not to mind what my expression gives away, I turn the handle.

I think he’s doing the same thing, judging by the way his mouth can’t decide what to do.

“Hello again,” I say. “Have a good time out there?”

“It was alright.”

I wave him in, and then go to stand by the fireplace. “Anything exciting? Stories to tell?”

He pushes a chair closer to the fire, then doesn’t sit in it, instead leaning his elbows over the top and linking his hands together. Maybe it’s an invitation for me to sit down in it. I don’t know; he probably doesn’t know, either.

He doesn’t answer, but looks down at the spot I am possibly supposed to be occupying, and sighs. “I’m sorry, Missy.”

“It’s fine.”

“We both know what ‘fine’ means.”

“Yeah. That’s why I said it.”

He looks up at me and lets the smile come through. “Which one of us is going to say it first?”

I shrug. “Well, which one of us is braver?”

“Alright,” he chuckles. “I missed you.”

I resist the urge to ask  _ oh really, what did you miss about me?  _ like an insecure teenager. “I missed you too.” In my head I actually told him that I missed him  _ more _ , but my voice would never let something that sentimental escape from it. “But, um… well, you had to come back eventually. You do live here, effectively.”

He raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t have to come find you in here.”

“What do you want me for, then?”  _ Do you want more time with Clara again? Or more opportunity to wallow in your failures? Both? Probably both. _

“What happened while I was gone?”

I shoot him a look. “What makes you think something happened?”

He doesn’t answer, because he expects me to tell the truth without being pressed for it nowadays.

“I had nightmares,” I say dismissively.

“What’s terrifying enough to give  _ you _ nightmares?” he asks. It could be a joke so easily. The way he says it, though… like whatever it is, he should be afraid of it too.

I grimace and sit down on the floor, hugging my legs and staring into the fire. “Me, of course.”

“Of course,” he echoes.

“Of what I could be. What I could be  _ again _ .”

I think he’s trying not to sound too hopeful, but it’s easier to deny that without looking at him. “You’re afraid of hurting people.”

“No,” I dismiss, chuckling. “I’m definitely not afraid of that. Don’t think I’ll ever be. If that was all my nightmares were, I’d be fine.”

He knew that. “What is it, then?”

I lay flat on my back and close my eyes, sufficiently anchored now. “A version of me that doesn’t have you.”

He abandons the chair and sits down next to me, placing his hand upon mine, asking for me to thread my fingers between his. There’s warmth on either side of me, from the fire and from the Doctor, equally elemental. It’s beginning to seep through my skin. 

“I never asked,” I say, realizing, “when you regenerated. After Gallifrey almost came back. After I died for a second time in one body.”

“Right after you did,” he answers softly. “I didn’t make it far.”

“What did you do?”

“Traded my life for a friend’s. This one wasn’t sudden. I had time.”

_ Of course _ , I think, but it’s not accompanied by the usual sensibility of derision. Just acceptance. “Time to say goodbye?”

I hear him sigh. “I didn’t  _ get _ to say goodbye to everyone.”

“If you made time to say goodbye to everyone… to mourn… you’d have far more people to mourn.” 

“I know.”

Of course he knows. He moved on, just like he always does. Now that I’m being sensible again, I know that it’s impossible that he could have missed the things I did after I first woke up. What I did in desire of his attention. I threw rocks, I made waves, but standing so far away, he thought they were just the wind. 

Lost in my own thoughts, I don’t notice he’s moving until he kisses my forehead. Then he pulls me up and nods towards the door. “Come on.”

“Back to business?” I say, wiping my eyes, unable to disguise the onset of a frown. 

“Not anymore,” he answers. “Not if you don’t want to. You can say no.”

“I’d never do that without knowing what I was saying no to.”

“You say you fear what you’d be without me. Do you want to see me without you?” he asks quietly. 

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” Too many  _ what if _ s. 

He laughs, ignorant to my fear. He’s even put on his persuasion face. “You don’t want to see what turned me into the person who wants to spend my time with you?”

A little jolt courses through me, like the heat of a bath on cold-numbed skin, and the reminder that this opportunity is to see what the Doctor  _ was _ \- not  _ is _ \- assuages my doubt. “Well, when you put it that way…”

“We’ll make it something easy. Something fun. We’ve had enough… well, just enough.”

“That sounds... nice.”

We begin making our way back upstairs as he contemplates aloud what would be the most amusing for me. I’ve taken a severe swing from afraid to excited. The pain of thinking about what I could have had if I wasn’t so headstrong back then is being eclipsed. 

“How do you feel about dinosaurs? Shopping malls? Bionic cowboys?” he asks animatedly once we’re back at the simulation device. 

I bite my lip, then shrug. “Dinosaurs are nice. Did I ever tell you about the time I had a giant land sloth as a pet? Her name was Lillian.”

“You must have left that out.” He types into the now-familiar interface of the simulation device, queuing up the time and place. “Ready, Missy?”

“I suppose this is as good a time as any.” A smile, a real one, lights up his face, and I can’t help but mirror it. It’s about time we had some happiness. “Oh, stop. Just put me in.”

* * *

This… isn’t what I was expecting. Definitely not the Triassic period. It’s not even a quaint little theme park. It’s… a hotel?

There’s nobody around, and the hallways are too small for anything larger than a velociraptor. It’s uncomfortably warm, like a radiator left on and forgotten after winter is over. Slow, heavy footsteps are only sound.

A faint stab pierces my skull. The psychic link isn’t strong enough for real words, but I can interpret the Doctor’s feelings just as well.

_ Oh, no _

_ Accident _

_ Why _

_ Fault _

_ Can’t get out _

_ Escape _

_ Can’t _


End file.
